2. Basics

Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible. (Alan Kay)

ne's user interface is essentially a compromise between the limits of character driven terminals and the power of GUIs. While real editing is done without ever touching a mouse, it is also true that editing should be doable without ever touching a manual. These two conflicting goals can be accomodated easily in a single program if we can offer a series of interfaces that allow for differentiated use.

In other words, it is unlikely that an ne wizard will ever have to activate a menu, but to become an expert user you just have to use the menus enough to learn by heart the most important keystrokes. A good manual is always invaluable when one comes to configuration and esoteric features, but few users will ever need to change ne's menus or key bindings.

Another important thing is that powerful features should always be accessible, at least in part, to every user. The average user should be able to record his actions, replay them, and save them in a humanly readable format for further use and editing.

In the following sections we shall take a quick tour of ne's features.

2.1 Terminology

In this section we explain and contrast some of the terms ne uses. Understanding these distinctions will go a long way towards making the rest of this manual make sense.

A file is a group of bytes stored on disk. This may seem rather obvious, but the important distinction here is that ne does not edit files; it edits documents.

A document is what ne calls one of the "text thingies" that you can edit. It is a sequence of lines of text in the computer's memory--not on disk. Documents can be created, edited, saved in files, loaded from files, discarded, et cetera. When a document is loaded from or saved to a file, it remains associated with that file by name until the document is either closed or saved to a different file. Interactions between documents and files are handled by the commands under the File menu. The Documents menu commands only deal with documents. See section Menus.

Internally, ne holds its documents in buffers. A buffer is a chunk of memory in which ne holds something. For example, each document is held in its own buffer, as are any loaded or recorded macros, undo records, a copy of your last deleted line of text, a copy of all your previous responses to long input, and several other things.

2.2 Starting

To start ne, just type `ne' and press Return. If you want to edit some specific file(s), you can put their name(s) on the command line just after the command name, as for any UN*X command. The screen of your terminal will be cleared (or filled with text loaded from the first file you specified).

At the bottom of the screen, you will see a line containing some numbers and letters. This is called the status bar because it reports to you part of the internal state of the editor.

Writing text is pretty straightforward: if your terminal is properly configured, every key will (should) do what you expect. Alphabetic characters insert text, cursor keys move the cursor, and so on. You can use the Delete and Backspace key to perform corrections. If your keyboard has an Insert key, you can use it to toggle (switch from on to off, or vice versa) insert mode. In general, ne tries to squeeze everything it can from your keyboard. Functions keys and special movement keys should work flawlessly if your terminal is properly configured. If not, complain to your system administrator.

At startup, the status bar has the following form:

 L:       1 C:       1  12% ia----pvu-------@A <unnamed>

(the numbers could be different, and a file name could be shown as last item instead of `<unnamed>'). You probably already guessed that the numbers after `L:' and `C:' are the line and column numbers, respectively, whereas the percentage indicates approximately your position in the file. The small letters represent user flags that you can turn on and off. In particular, `i' tells you that insert mode is on, while `p' tells that the automatic preferences system is activated. For a thorough explanation of the meaning of the flags on the status line, see The Status Bar.

Once you are accustomed to cursor movement and line editing, it is time to press f1 (the first function key), or in case your keyboard does not have such a key, Escape. Immediately, the menu bar will appear, and the first menu will be drawn (if you find yourself waiting for the menu to appear, you can press Escape twice in a row). You can now move around menus and menu items by pressing the cursor keys. Moreover, a lower case alphabetic key will move to the first item whose name starts with that letter, and an upper case alphabetic key will move to the first menu whose name starts with that letter.

Moving around the menus should give you an idea of the capabilities of ne. If you want to save your work, you should use the `Save As...' item from the `File' menu. Menus are fully discussed in Menus. When you want to exit from the menu system, press f1 (or Escape) again. If you instead prefer to choose a command and execute it, move to the respective menu item and press Return.

At the end of several menu items you will find strange symbols like ^A or f1. They represent shortcuts for the respective menu items. In other words, instead of activating, selecting and executing a menu item, which can take seconds, you can simply press a couple of keys. The symbol `^' in front of a character denotes the shortcut produced by the Control key plus that character (we assume here that you are perfectly aware of the usage of the Control key: it is just as if you had to type a capital letter with Shift). The descriptions of the form fn represent instead function keys. Finally, the symbol `[' in front of a character denotes the shortcut produced by Control plus Meta (a.k.a. Alt) plus that character, or Meta plus that character, depending on your terminal emulator--you must check by yourself. Moreover, these last bindings could not work with some terminals, in which case you can replace them with a sequence: just press the Escape key followed by the letter. A few menu items are bound to two control sequences (just in case one does not work, or it is impractical).

Note that under certain conditions (for instance, while using ne through a telnet connection) some of the shortcuts might not work because they are trapped by the operating system for other purposes (see section Hints and Tricks).

Finally, we have the third and last interface to ne's features: the command line. If you press Control-K, or Escape followed by `:' (a la vi), you will be requested to enter a command to execute. Just press Return for the time being (or, if you are really interested in this topic, see section The Command Line).

In the sections that follow, when explaining how to use a command we shall usually describe the corresponding menu item. The related shortcut and command can be found on the menu item itself, and in Menus.

2.3 Loading and Saving

The first thing to learn about an editor is how to exit. ne has a CloseDoc command that can be activated by pressing Control-Q, by choosing the `Close' item of the `Document' menu, or by activating the command line with Control-K, writing `cd' and pressing Return. Its effect is to close the current document without saving any modifications. (You will be requested to confirm your choice in case the current document has been modified since the last save.)

There is also a Quit command, which closes all the documents without saving any modifications, and an Save&Exit (Meta-X) command, which saves the modified documents before quitting.

This choice of shortcuts could surprise you. Wouldn't Quit be a much better candidate for Control-Q? Well, experience shows that the most common operation is closing a document rather than quitting the editor. If there is just one document, the two operations coincide (this is typical, for instance, when you use ne for writing electronic mail), and if there are many documents, it is far more common to close a single document than all the existing documents.

If you want to load a file, you may use the Open command, which can be activated by pressing Control-O, by choosing the `Open...' item of the `File' menu, or by typing it on the command line (as in the previous case). You will be prompted with a list of files and directories in the current working directory. (You can tell the directory names because they end with a slash.) You can select any of the file names by using the cursor keys, or any other movement key. Pressing an alphabetic key will move the cursor to the first entry after the cursor that starts with the given letter. When the cursor is positioned over the file you want to open, press Return, and the file will be opened. If instead you move to a directory name, pressing Return will display the contents of that directory.

You can also escape with f1, Escape or Escape-Escape and manually type the file name on the command line (or escape again, and abort the Open operation). If you escape with Tab instead, the file or directory under the cursor will be copied in the input line, where you can modify it manually. ne has also file name completion features activated by Tab (see section The Input Line).

When you want to save a file, just use the command Save (Control-S). It will use the current document name or will ask you for one if the current document has no name. SaveAs, on the other hand, will always ask for a new name before saving the file.

If ne is interrupted by an external signal (for instance, if your terminal crashes), it will try to save your work in some emergency files. These files will have names similar to your current files, but they will have a pound sign # prepended to their names. See section Emergency Save.

2.4 Editing

An editor is presumably used for editing text. If you decide not to edit text, you probably don't want to use ne, because that's all it does--it edits text. It does not play Tetris. It does not evaluate recursive functions. It does not solve your love problems. It just allows you to edit text.

The design of ne makes editing extremely natural and straightforward. There is nothing special you have to do to start editing once you've started ne. Just start typing, and the text you type shows up in your document.

ne provides two ways of deleting characters, the Backspace (or Control-H, if you have no such key) and the Delete key. In the former case you delete the character to the left of the cursor, while in the latter case you delete the character just under the cursor. This is in contrast with many UN*X editors, which for unknown reasons decide to limit your ways of destroying things--something notoriously much funnier than creating. (See DeleteChar and Backspace.)

If you want to delete a line, you can use the DeleteLine command, or Control-Y. A very nice feature of ne is that each time a nonempty line is deleted, it is stored in a temporary buffer from which it can be undeleted via the UndelLine command or Control-U. (See DeleteLine and UndelLine.)

If you want to copy, cut, paste or erase a block of text, you have to set a mark. This is done via the Mark command, activated by choosing the `Mark Block' item of the `Edit' menu, or by pressing Control-B (think "block"). This command toggles the mark (puts it in the current cursor position or removes it from wherever it is). Whenever the mark is set, the zone between the mark and the cursor can be cut, copied or erased. Note that by using Control-@ you can set a vertical mark instead, which allows you to mark rectangles of text. Whenever a mark has been set, either an `M' appears on the command line or a `V' appears if the mark is vertical. If you forget where the mark is currently, you can use the `Goto Mark' menu item of the `Search' menu to move the cursor to it.

When you cut or copy a block, you can save it with the `Save Clip...' menu item of the `Edit' menu. You can also load a file into a clip with `Open Clip...', and paste it anywhere. All such operations act on the current clip, which is by default the clip 0. You can change the current clip number with the ClipNumber command. See section ClipNumber.

One of the most noteworthy features of ne is its unlimited undo/redo capability. Each editing action is recorded, and can be played back and forth as much as you like. Undo and redo are bound to the function keys f5 and f6.

Another interesting feature of ne is it's ability to load an unlimited number of documents. If you activate the NewDoc command (using the `Document' menu or the command line), a new, empty document will be created. You can switch between the existing documents in memory with f2 and f3, which are bound to the PrevDoc and NextDoc commands. If you have a lot of documents, the `Select...' menu item (f4) prompts you with the list of names of currently loaded documents and allows you to choose directly what to edit.

2.5 Basic Preferences

ne has a number of flags that specify alternative behaviours, the most prototypical example being the insert flag, which specifies whether the text you type is inserted into the existing text or overwrites it. You can toggle this flag with the `Insert' menu item of the `Prefs' menu, or with the Insert key of your keyboard. (Toggle means to change the value of a flag from true to false, or from false to true; see section Insert.)

Another important flag is the free form flag, which specifies whether the cursor can be moved beyond the right end of each line of text or only to existing text (a la vi). Programmers usually prefer non free form editing; text writers seem to prefer free form. See FreeForm for some elaboration. The free form flag can be set with the `Free Form' menu item of the `Prefs' menu.

At this point, we suggest you explore by trial and error the other flags of the Prefs menu, or try the Flags command (see section Flags), which explains all the flags and the commands that operate on them. We prefer spending a few words discussing automatic preferences or autoprefs.

Having many flags ensures a high degree of flexibility, but it can turn editing into a nightmare if you have to turn on and off dozens of flags for each different kind of file you edit. ne's solution is to automatically set a document's flags when a file is loaded based on your stated preferences for each file type. A file's type is determined by the extension of its file name, that is, the last group of letters after the last dot. For instance, the extension of `ne.texinfo' is `texinfo', the extension of `source.c' is `c', and the extension of `my.txt' is `txt'.

Whenever you select the `Save AutoPrefs' menu item, ne saves the flags of your current document to be used when you load other files with the same extension as your current document. These autoprefs are saved in a file in your `~/.ne' directory. This file has the same name as the extension of the current document with `#ap' appended to it. It contains all the commands necessary to recreate your current document's flag settings. Whenever you open a file with this file name extension, ne will automagically recreate your prefered flag settings for that file type. (There is a flag that inhibits the process; see section AutoPrefs.)

Finally, when you select the `Save Def Prefs' menu item, a special preferences file named `.default#ap' is saved. These preferences are loaded whenever ne is run before loading any file. This is how you set up the preferences you always want to be set.

Note also that a preferences file is just a macro (as described in the following section). Thus, it can be edited manually if necessary.

2.6 Basic Macros

Very often, the programmer or the text writer has to repeat some complex editing action over a series of similar blocks of text. This is where macros come in.

A macro is a stored sequence of commands. Any sequence of commands you find yourself repeating is an excellent candidate for being made into a macro. You could create a macro by editing a document that only contains valid ne commands and saving it, but by far the easiest way to create a macro is to have ne record your actions. ne allows you to record macros and then play them (execute the commands they contain) many times. You can save them on disk for future use, edit them, or bind them to any key. You could even reconfigure each key of your keyboard to play a complex macro if you wanted to.

ne can have any number of named macros loaded at the same time. It can also have one unnamed macro in its current macro buffer. The named macros are typical" align="l>[ >> ]         [Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]

2.3 Loading and Saving

The first thing to learn about an editor is how to exit. ne has a CloseDoc command that can be activated by pressing Control-Q, by choosing the `Close' item of the `Document' menu, or by activating the command line with Control-K, writing `cd' and pressing Return. Its effect is to close the current document without saving any modifications. (You will be requested to confirm your choice in case the current document has been modified since the last save.)

There is also a Quit command, which closes all the documents without saving any modifications, and an Save&Exit (Meta-X) command, which saves the modified documents before quitting.

This choice of shortcuts could surprise you. Wouldn't Quit be a much better candidate for Control-Q? Well, experience shows that the most common operation is closing a document rather than quitting the editor. If there is just one document, the two operations coincide (this is typical, for instance, when you use ne for writing electronic mail), and if there are many documents, it is far more common to close a single document than all the existing documents.

If you want to load a file, you may use the Open command, which can be activated by pressing Control-O, by choosing the `Open...' item of the `File' menu, or by typing it on the command line (as in the previous case). You will be prompted with a list of files and directories in the current working directory. (You can tell the directory names because they end with a slash.) You can select any of the file names by using the cursor keys, or any other movement key. Pressing an alphabetic key will move the cursor to the first entry after the cursor that starts with the given letter. When the cursor is positioned over the file you want to open, press Return, and the file will be opened. If instead you move to a directory name, pressing Return will display the contents of that directory.

You can also escape with f1, Escape or Escape-Escape and manually type the file name on the command line (or escape again, and abort the Open operation). If you escape with Tab instead, the file or directory under the cursor will be copied in the input line, where you can modify it manually. ne has also file name completion features activated by Tab (see section The Input Line).

When you want to save a file, just use the command Save (Control-S). It will use the current document name or will ask you for one if the current document has no name. SaveAs, on the other hand, will always ask for a new name before saving the file.

If ne is interrupted by an external signal (for instance, if your terminal crashes), it will try to save your work in some emergency files. These files will have names similar to your current files, but they will have a pound sign # prepended to their names. See section Emergency Save.

2.4 Editing

An editor is presumably used for editing text. If you decide not to edit text, you probably don't want to use ne, because that's all it does--it edits text. It does not play Tetris. It does not evaluate recursive functions. It does not solve your love problems. It just allows you to edit text.

The design of ne makes editing extremely natural and straightforward. There is nothing special you have to do to start editing once you've started ne. Just start typing, and the text you type shows up in your document.

ne provides two ways of deleting characters, the Backspace (or Control-H, if you have no such key) and the Delete key. In the former case you delete the character to the left of the cursor, while in the latter case you delete the character just under the cursor. This is in contrast with many UN*X editors, which for unknown reasons decide to limit your ways of destroying things--something notoriously much funnier than creating. (See DeleteChar and Backspace.)

If you want to delete a line, you can use the DeleteLine command, or Control-Y. A very nice feature of ne is that each time a nonempty line is deleted, it is stored in a temporary buffer from which it can be undeleted via the UndelLine command or Control-U. (See DeleteLine and UndelLine.)

If you want to copy, cut, paste or erase a block of text, you have to set a mark. This is done via the Mark command, activated by choosing the `Mark Block' item of the `Edit' menu, or by pressing Control-B (think "block"). This command toggles the mark (puts it in the current cursor position or removes it from wherever it is). Whenever the mark is set, the zone between the mark and the cursor can be cut, copied or erased. Note that by using Control-@ you can set a vertical mark instead, which allows you to mark rectangles of text. Whenever a mark has been set, either an `M' appears on the command line or a `V' appears if the mark is vertical. If you forget where the mark is currently, you can use the `Goto Mark' menu item of the `Search' menu to move the cursor to it.

When you cut or copy a block, you can save it with the `Save Clip...' menu item of the `Edit' menu. You can also load a file into a clip with `Open Clip...', and paste it anywhere. All such operations act on the current clip, which is by default the clip 0. You can change the current clip number with the ClipNumber command. See section ClipNumber.

One of the most noteworthy features of ne is its unlimited undo/redo capability. Each editing action is recorded, and can be played back and forth as much as you like. Undo and redo are bound to the function keys f5 and f6.

Another interesting feature of ne is it's ability to load an unlimited number of documents. If you activate the NewDoc command (using the `Document' menu or the command line), a new, empty document will be created. You can switch between the existing documents in memory with f2 and f3, which are bound to the PrevDoc and NextDoc commands. If you have a lot of documents, the `Select...' menu item (f4) prompts you with the list of names of currently loaded documents and allows you to choose directly what to edit.

2.5 Basic Preferences

ne has a number of flags that specify alternative behaviours, the most prototypical example being the insert flag, which specifies whether the text you type is inserted into the existing text or overwrites it. You can toggle this flag with the `Insert' menu item of the `Prefs' menu, or with the Insert key of your keyboard. (Toggle means to change the value of a flag from true to false, or from false to true; see section Insert.)

Another important flag is the free form flag, which specifies whether the cursor can be moved beyond the right end of each line of text or only to existing text (a la vi). Programmers usually prefer non free form editing; text writers seem to prefer free form. See FreeForm for some elaboration. The free form flag can be set with the `Free Form' menu item of the `Prefs' menu.

At this point, we suggest you explore by trial and error the other flags of the Prefs menu, or try the Flags command (see section Flags), which explains all the flags and the commands that operate on them. We prefer spending a few words discussing automatic preferences or autoprefs.

Having many flags ensures a high degree of flexibility, but it can turn editing into a nightmare if you have to turn on and off dozens of flags for each different kind of file you edit. ne's solution is to automatically set a document's flags when a file is loaded based on your stated preferences for each file type. A file's type is determined by the extension of its file name, that is, the last group of letters after the last dot. For instance, the extension of `ne.texinfo' is `texinfo', the extension of `source.c' is `c', and the extension of `my.txt' is `txt'.

Whenever you select the `Save AutoPrefs' menu item, ne saves the flags of your current document to be used when you load other files with the same extension as your current document. These autoprefs are saved in a file in your `~/.ne' directory. This file has the same name as the extension of the current document with `#ap' appended to it. It contains all the commands necessary to recreate your current document's flag settings. Whenever you open a file with this file name extension, ne will automagically recreate your prefered flag settings for that file type. (There is a flag that inhibits the process; see section AutoPrefs.)

Finally, when you select the `Save Def Prefs' menu item, a special preferences file named `.default#ap' is saved. These preferences are loaded whenever ne is run before loading any file. This is how you set up the preferences you always want to be set.

Note also that a preferences file is just a macro (as described in the following section). Thus, it can be edited manually if necessary.

2.6 Basic Macros

Very often, the programmer or the text writer has to repeat some complex editing action over a series of similar blocks of text. This is where macros come in.

A macro is a stored sequence of commands. Any sequence of commands you find yourself repeating is an excellent candidate for being made into a macro. You could create a macro by editing a document that only contains valid ne commands and saving it, but by far the easiest way to create a macro is to have ne record your actions. ne allows you to record macros and then play them (execute the commands they contain) many times. You can save them on disk for future use, edit them, or bind them to any key. You could even reconfigure each key of your keyboard to play a complex macro if you wanted to.

ne can have any number of named macros loaded at the same time. It can also have one unnamed macro in its current macro buffer. The named macros are typical" align="l>[ >> ]         [Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]

2.3 Loading and Saving

The first thing to learn about an editor is how to exit. ne has a CloseDoc command that can be activated by pressing Control-Q, by choosing the `Close' item of the `Document' menu, or by activating the command line with Control-K, writing `cd' and pressing Return. Its effect is to close the current document without saving any modifications. (You will be requested to confirm your choice in case the current document has been modified since the last save.)

There is also a Quit command, which closes all the documents without saving any modifications, and an Save&Exit (Meta-X) command, which saves the modified documents before quitting.

This choice of shortcuts could surprise you. Wouldn't Quit be a much better candidate for Control-Q? Well, experience shows that the most common operation is closing a document rather than quitting the editor. If there is just one document, the two operations coincide (this is typical, for instance, when you use ne for writing electronic mail), and if there are many documents, it is far more common to close a single document than all the existing documents.

If you want to load a file, you may use the Open command, which can be activated by pressing Control-O, by choosing the `Open...' item of the `File' menu, or by typing it on the command line (as in the previous case). You will be prompted with a list of files and directories in the current working directory. (You can tell the directory names because they end with a slash.) You can select any of the file names by using the cursor keys, or any other movement key. Pressing an alphabetic key will move the cursor to the first entry after the cursor that starts with the given letter. When the cursor is positioned over the file you want to open, press Return, and the file will be opened. If instead you move to a directory name, pressing Return will display the contents of that directory.

You can also escape with f1, Escape or Escape-Escape and manually type the file name on the command line (or escape again, and abort the Open operation). If you escape with Tab instead, the file or directory under the cursor will be copied in the input line, where you can modify it manually. ne has also file name completion features activated by Tab (see section The Input Line).

When you want to save a file, just use the command Save (Control-S). It will use the current document name or will ask you for one if the current document has no name. SaveAs, on the other hand, will always ask for a new name before saving the file.

If ne is interrupted by an external signal (for instance, if your terminal crashes), it will try to save your work in some emergency files. These files will have names similar to your current files, but they will have a pound sign # prepended to their names. See section Emergency Save.