[self-interest] How to export sources as text

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Jesse,

if you execute

       inspect: traits morph

you will get a reasonable print out in the terminal window where you 
started Self. Depending on the GUI you are using, the easiest solution 
is to copy the result and paste it into some text editor. 'inspect:' is 
implemented in defaultBehavior and uses 'inspectReflectee:', which 
unfortunately uses 'print' so it can't send the output to a file 
instead of the terminal. It would be easy to copy this method to change 
that, however.

But Self includes a sophisticated text export and import mechanism 
called "the transporter". Every object and every slot can be annotated 
as belonging to some "module" which is associated with a .self source 
file. This means that a single object can have its definition divided 
among several modules (files), each dealing with a different aspect of 
it. And a module can include the (partial) definition for many objects.

If you look at the result of the "inspect: traits morph" above or if 
you open up an outliner on traits morph (just type "traits morph"  in 
any evaluator and press the "get it" button. Then press the small 
triangle in the result to open it up) you will see "9 modules".

The traits morph object itself is defined in module "morph", but its 
slots belong to the "activity", "editorMorph", "morph", "morphSaving", 
"outliner", "structuredEditing", "ui2Button", "ui2Menu" and 
"webBrowser" modules. All you have to do is execute expressions like

          modules morph fileOut

and you will have a "morph.self" file (it will be in a ui2 
subdirectory, and if you don't have that you might get an error). I 
find these files far less readable than what it generated by 'inspect:' 
since there is a lot of slot declaration overhead, but the method 
sources themselves are the same.

A more graphical way of doing this is to point to the background and 
choose "changed modules" from the middle button menu. A pink object 
should appear, but unless you have changed something it will be empty. 
You can use the middle button on it to choose "All Modules" which will 
give you an outliner view of all modules in the system. You can expand 
a few levels to get to morph (all2->allUI2) and just press the small 
"w" button beside it to write out the file.

Good luck,
-- Jecel