6. Hints and Tricks

Use f1 or Escape-Escape, not Escape.

Due to the limitations of the techniques used when communicating with a terminal, it is not possible to "decide" that the user pressed the Escape key for about a second after the actual key press (see section EscapeTime). This means that you will experience annoying delays when using menus. If you have no f1 key, use Escape-Escape, or redefine a keystroke assigning the command Escape, and you will be able to use that keystroke instead of Escape.

Check for the presence of a Meta key.

If your system has a standard Meta or Alt key, there is a good chance that you have several other shortcuts. If the built-in Meta bindings do not work, you must discover which is the effect of the Meta in your terminal emulator. Indeed, it is possible in theory to configure about 150 shortcuts. See section Configuration.

ne does tilda expansion.

When you have to specify a file name, you can always start with `~/' in order to specify your home directory, or `~user/' to specify the home directory of another user.

ne does interactive filename completion.

When you have to specify a file name as last element of a long input, you can invoke the completer using Tab. If you hit it twice in a row, you will enter the file requester, where you can navigate and escape back to the command line, either with f1, which will let you edit again your previous input, or with Tab, which will copy your current selection over your previous file name. In other words, you can freely alternate completion, editing and browsing.

The Escape delay when activating menus can be avoided.

If you press after Escape any key that does not produce the second character of an escape sequence, ne will immediately recognize the Escape key code as such. Since non-alphabetical keys have no effect while browsing through the menus, if you're forced to use Escape as menu activator you can press, for instance, `,' just after it to speed up the menu activation (note that `:' would not work, because it would activate the command line). Alternatively, you can just type Escape twice in a row.

Use turbo mode for lengthy operations.

Turbo mode (see section Turbo) allows performing very complex operations without updating the screen until the operations are complete. This can be a major plus if you are editing very long files, or if your terminal is slow. If the default value (0, which means twice the number of visible rows) does not give you the best results, experiment other valuesrbo mode (see section ossibly specifying a complete path) using the --keys argument (see section Arguments).

The format of the file is very simple: each line starting with the `KEY' sequence of capital characters is considered the description of a key binding. All other lines are considered commments. The format of a key binding description is

KEY hexcode command

The hexcode value is the ASCII code of the keystroke. (For special keys such as Insert or function keys, you should take a look at the file `default.keys' that comes with ne's distribution: it contains a complete, commented definition of ne's standard bindings that you can modify with a trial-and-error approach.) You can write just the hexadecimal digits, nothing else is necessary (but a prefixing `0x' is tolerated). For instance,

KEY 1 MoveSOL

binds to Control-A the action of moving to the start of a line, while

KEY 101 LineUp

binds to the "cursor-up" key the action of moving the cursor one line up.

command can be any ne command, including Escape (which allows reconfiguring the menu activator) and Macro, which allows binding complex sequences of actions to a single keystroke. The binding of a macro is very fast because on the first call the macro is cached in memory. See section Macro.

Note that you cannot ever redefine Return and Escape. This is a basic issue--however brain damaged is the current configuration, you will always be able to exploit fully the menus and the command line.

Besides the "standard" combinations (e.g., Control-letter), it possible to program combinations based on the Meta key (a.k.a. Alt). The situation in this case is a bit more involved, because depending on the terminal emulator you are using, the effect of the Meta key can be widely different. For instance, xterm raises the eigth bit of a character, so, for instance,

KEY 81 MoveSOF

binds Control-Meta-a to the action of moving to the start of the document. However, gnome-terminal will emit the character of ASCII code 1 prefixed with ESC instead. To handle this case, ne provides codes from 180 on for simulated Meta sequences: for instance,

KEY 181 MoveSOF

binds the abovementioned sequence to the same action as before. In general, the code 180+x corresponds to the sequence ESC followed by the ASCII character of code x. Note that some of these sequences may be disabled, if they conflict with existing sequences of your terminal (for instance, ESC followed by `O' is always disabled because it prefixes several built-in keyboard sequences).

As a final note, we remark that typing Meta-a on gnome-terminal will produce an ESC followed by `a'. Since it is obviously easier to press just Meta rather than Meta and Control at the same time, it is a good idea to associated the same sequence also to this combination, using

KEY 1E1 MoveSOF

Moreover, this setting provides the user with a second choice: one can press Escape followed by a letter instead of using modififiers.

This is the approach used by default in ne: this way, Control with Meta plus a letter should always work, and Meta should work sometimes (of course, if you're sure to use always the same kind of emulator you can bind more features). Again, the best place to look at it's `default.keys'.

The key binding file is parsed at startup. If something does not work,