[Oberon] Extending the mouse control facilities.

[Chris Glur]

Q. How would you boot and use ETHO, without a keyboard.

A1. Setup the 'initialisation' of Oberon.Text so as to load ASCIITab.Tool
Now you've got a keyboard on the screen where chars are selected by MM.

This is an example of using gadgets to do <action , argument>; which we
should be able to confirm by 'marking' one of the keys and invoking 
` Columbus.Inspect ~ `
I've often had problems with Columbus not showing the selected or marked 
gadget, unless I repeat try. I can't inspect individual 'keys' of ASCII Table
with Columbus, and I don't want to have to analyse the source code.

Any way this is not exactly what I want: where the action & the arg/s are 
embedded in the gadget.   What I want is, to be able to :
MR to set the mode to do the ACTION when any arg is 'cluked' [some mouse
combination] until another M.P is invoked to return the system to normal
ETHO-mode.

This would also eg. enable single chars or white-space-bounded-words to be
copied to the caret-position;  besides doing all the many <repeat the same action
on a varying sequence of arguments>.  Like change the colour & font to red-bold
of all the subsequent cluked white-space-bounded-words until <reset to normal>
is activated.

Q. is there any fundamental problem with this idea?

Q. where would I start; I don't want to use gadgets, since it should work 
also  on text frames; so it seems that I'd have to mess with the 
lowish-level  mouse-interpretation-loop.  Or should I take a successive 
refinement  approach  and first do it with gadgets, to see how it feels?

TIA

==Chris Glur.