Some lists are automatically updated or are generated on-the-fly as needed. The lists named "contigs" and "readings" correspond to the currently selected contigs in the contig selector window and the currently selected readings in the template displays. Note that lists (with any names) can also be created from selected items in the contig editor.See section Set Output List. The "allcontigs" and "allreadings" lists are created as needed and always contain an identifier for every contig and every reading identifier.
Because of the way the lists are implemented, as is outlined below, there are some useful "tricks" that can be employed. A list name consisting of a contig identifier surrounded by square brackets ('[' and ']') will cause the creation of a list containing all of the readings within that contig. For example, to use the Extract Readings option (see section Extract Readings) to extract all the readings from contig 'xb54f8.s1', the list name given in the Extract Readings dialogue would be '[xb54f8.s1]'.
A list name surrounded by curly brackets ('{' and '}') will cause the creation of a list containing all of the readings in the contigs named in the specified list name. So '{contigs}' is equivalent to all the readings in the contigs contained in the 'contigs' list. Hence the 'allreadings' list is identical to '{allcontigs}'.
These tricks can be used anywhere where a list name is required except for editing and deletion of lists. As a final example, to produce a file of filenames for the currently selected contigs, save the list named '{contigs}' to a file.