Differences in User Interface

To the user, TPlusMemo will appear exactly as a TMemo except for a few differences:

There is the possibility to have left and right margins set by the application;

Text may be justified (left and right alignment);

Selected text color is not necessarily that set from Windows user settings.  In fact, the default behavior is to have pixel color inversion for selected text.

Vertical scrolling with pixel resolution;

Navigation with arrow keys can be more like that of a code editor, to the programmer's choice (see Options).

It can do drag and drop editing, automatic hiding of scroll bars, auto indenting and back indenting, fast line selection, columnar block selection; these optional features are controlled by property Options

Optional end of text mark: an horizontal line is drawn at the end of the text.  This is controlled by property EndOfTextMark;

Optional background picture;

Multi level Undo-Redo: Ctrl-Z does undo, Ctrl-Shift-Z does Redo;

Columnar block selection: Alt-Shift + arrow key or Alt+Mouse drag (see property Options)

Ctrl-T will enter a Tab, as opposed to Ctrl-I for TMemo;

Ctrl-B: toggles selected text to bold, if StaticFormat is True;

Ctrl-I: toggles selected text to italic, if StaticFormat is True;

Ctrl-U: toggles selected text to underline, if StaticFormat is True;

Ctrl-H: toggles color highlight for selected text, if StaticFormat is True;

Ctrl-F: toggles alternate font for selected text, if StaticFormat is True;

If no text is selected, the effect of text formatting control keys applies to subsequent typing at the current location (if StaticFormat is True).  These keys may be disabled programmatically with the EnableHotKeys property

Differences in Programming Interface

The following methods and properties of TMemo are not supported in TPlusMemo or TDBPlusMemo

MaxLength;

OEMConvert;

WantReturns

There exist a difference for properties and methods common to both TPlusMemo and TMemo:

In TPlusMemo, property SelLength is negative if the caret is at the end of the selection and positive if at the beginning; property SelStart always indicates the caret position.

In TMemo, SelLength is always positive and SelStart always indicates the start of selection.

Most importantly, TPlusMemo introduces many properties, methods and events for the application programmer.  See TPlusMemo topic for a discussion.

Finally, TPlusMemo does not support Windows edit control messages (messages beginning with EM_).  Rather, the application interacts with the control through properties and methods.