Simple editor for X: Users' Guide - chapter 2
Short tutorial
If SeX has been installed properly, it can be from a Unix command
line by using the command sex. This will start SeX with no files
loaded. You can load files later by using the File menu. You can also
load files directly from the command line, by giving their names
after the name of the program:
sex letter.txt
The above command would load the file letter.txt into
the editor. You can load as many files as you wish, from the
command line, via the File menu, or in any combination. SeX
does not limit the number of files that are loaded. SeX does
not have any command line options.
The window has a menu bar at the top, a large text area in the
middle, scroll bars below and to the right of the text area, and
a status line at the bottom. The status line shows the current
position in the text, and the total size of the text. When the
file has been modified but not yet saved, the end of the status
line will have two stars.
To insert new text, you just type. There is no special command
you need to use. SeX is `eight bit clean', meaning that non-English
letters will usually work, at least for West European languages.
If you have selected text (this is explained in the next two
sections), typing something will replace the selection.
The greatest appeal of SeX is what it allows you to do with
a mouse, its mouse language. If you've used X a lot,
you are probably familiar with xterm. SeX
defines the following mouse language:
- Left mouse button selects text. Painting: you move
the mouse to one end of the text to be selected, press
the left button, move the mouse to the other end, and
release the button. Clicking: Clicking twice selects the
word under the mouse cursor, and thrice selects the line.
You can combine painting and clicking: if you replace the
second or third click with a paint, the painting will be
done in units of words or lines.
- Right mouse button changes the selection. It moves the
nearest end of the selection to the cursor.
- The middle mouse button cuts or pastes text. If the mouse
cursor was inside the selection, then the selection is cut:
removed from the text and put into the kill ring. If the
mouse cursor was outside the selection, the selection is
pasted (inserted into the text) at the location of the
cursor.
The way SeX uses the middle mouse button is unique to SeX,
and makes it really easy to delete and move text around, which
is what most editing is.
The selection is shown with black background. There is no
separate text cursor: the selection is the text cursor.
The selection may be columnar, i.e., a rectangle that selects
only between the columns of the end points. The shape of the
selection is controlled with the Toggle columnar entry in
the Edit menu.
SeX defines some more things that can be done with the mouse,
but they will be described later.
The empty selection can be moved around with the cursor keys,
as usual. Some Emacs key bindings also work; see
Command summary
, chapter 4. If the selection was not empty, it
will be made empty, by selecting the empty string at either end
of the selection.
Non-empty selections can be made by pressing Shift and a cursor
key. This moves one end of the selection, and keeps the other end at
the same place. For example, pressing Shift-Right twice, selects
the next two characters. Pressing Control-Shift-Right selects the
next two words.
When you have selected text, you can cut it,
by clicking inside the text with the middle mouse button. This
will remove the selected text from the file, and put it into
a kill ring (sort of like a clipboard). If you then move
to some other place, you can paste the text from the kill
ring, again by clicking with the middle mouse button. This is
a simple way to move text around in the text.
The kill ring is different from a traditional clipboard in
that it can contain many pieces of text. After you have pasted
the first piece of text in the ring, you can replace the pasted
text with the next piece of text, by pressing the control key
while you click the middle mouse button. And then you can replace
that with the next piece. After the last piece of text, you get
the first piece again (that's why it's a ring). You can do this
any number of times. This is useful when you know you regret
having deleted text some time ago, and would like to get it back.
Instead of cutting the selected text, you can paste it directly
by just clicking with the middle mouse button outside the selection.
Copying is as simple as moving.
You can also cut, copy, and paste with the keyboard. Delete
cuts, Alt-W copies, Insert pastes the most recent text in
the kill ring, and Control-Insert goes round in the kill
ring. Further key bindings are shown in Command summary
, chapter 4.
The Edit menu allows you to do the editing without having
to memorize anything. It is just somewhat slow.
The File menu allows you to operate on files:
- New
- Create a new buffer. A buffer is the in-memory version of
a file. The new buffer is empty, and does not have name.
- Load
- Load a file into memory, into a new buffer.
- Save
- Save buffer to disk. Any modifications you make to a buffer will
vanish when you quit SeX, unless you save them first. SeX
warns you if you try to quit without saving.
- Save as
- Save buffer to a new file. This changes the
name of the buffer. If you load file A, edit it, and save it
as B, then the disk will have two files, A and B, but only B
will have the edits.
- Save all modified
- Save all buffers that have not been changed. If you work on
many files at the same time, use this to save all of them, so that
you don't have to go through all files and save them one by one.
- Insert file
- Insert the contents of a new file into the current one.
- Write selection to
- Write the selected text to a file.
- Remove buffer
- Forget everything about a buffer. This does not remove
the actual file from the disk, only the in-memory version of it.
You can't remove a modified buffer, but see the next entry.
- Mark unmodified
- Forget that a buffer has been modified. The changes will remain,
but SeX will clear the `modified' flag for the file. This lets you remove
the buffer without saving the changes.
- Next file
- Show the next file in this window. If you have many files loaded
at the same time, this moves to the next one. The files are in a ring,
so you can go through all of them until you get back to the one you
started with.
- Previous file
- Move backwards through the ring of files.
- Exit
- Commence celibacy.
The Search menu allows you to search, and optionally replace
text in a file. The first entry in the menu pops up the search and
replace dialog box. The other entries are alternative ways to select
the command buttons in the dialog box.
The dialog box has two text fields, for the text to search for,
and the text to replace it with. There are also option buttons
for backwards searching (default is forwards), case insensitive
matching (makes `a' match `A'), and regular expressions (a powerful
way to write complicated patterns; see regex(7)).
In the replacement text, you can use & to include the
matched text. For example, if the search pattern matches foo
in the text, and the replacement text is &bar, the text
will be modified to be foobar. To get & itself,
you need to type \& (and \\ to get a backslash; no
other escapes work, however).
The command buttons are:
- Search next
- Search the next place where the search text occurs.
- Replace+search
- Replace this occurence of the search text with the replacement text,
and then search again.
- Replace this
- Just replace this occurence.
- Replace all
- Replace this and all other occurences.
- Reset
- Make the search and replacement texts empty, and select the
default values for the options.
- Dismiss
- Close the dialog box.
The dialog box will stay visible until you close it.
SeX allows as many windows as you wish. You can have any number of
windows displaying the same file, or a different file in each window.
Windows are created using the Window menu:
- Clone
- Create a new window, which is a clone of the current window.
The new window will show the same file at the same place, but will
not have the same selection, since only one window at a time can have
a non-empty selection.
- Every file
- Open a new window for every file that does not already have its
own window.
- Close this
- Close a window.
- Close others
- Close all other windows.
Note that every SeX window is a different top level window (which
means, for example, that you can iconify them separately). SeX does
not divide its top level windows into subwindows.
Simple editor for X: Users' Guide
- Copyright © 1996, 1997 Lars Wirzenius.
Contents; abstract; next; back.
Version 0.12
Lars Wirzenius liw@iki.fi