The General portion of the ISPF Settings panel allows you to specify values for the input field pad and command delimiter.

Input field pad

Specifies a pad character that controls the initial padding of blank (unfilled) panel input fields, including the selection panels, but not the data portion, of an Edit display. Within Edit, you control null or blank padding with Edit commands.

The pad character specified can be a B (blank), N (nulls), or any special (non-alphanumeric) character.

Note: When you are running in GUI mode, blank pad characters will be displayed as nulls in order to avoid the need to delete blank characters when replace mode is not available.

Command delimiter

You can stack commands on the command line by separating them with a delimiter. The default delimiter, the semicolon, can be changed using this option. Alphanumeric characters, the period (.), and the equal sign (=) are not valid command delimiters. Stacking allows you to enter, for example:

===> FIND DEPT;HEX ON

which finds the characters DEPT and then displays the file at that point in hexadecimal mode.

The system variable for the delimiter is ZDEL. For more information about ZDEL, refer to the z/OS ISPF Dialog Developer's Guide and Reference.