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Options

The following options are available from the command line:

-e

Turns off expansion of tab character to spaces.

-i

Turns off display of information window at top of terminal.

-h

Turns off highlighting of borders of windows and menus (improves performance on some terminals).

+#

Moves the cursor to line '#' at startup.

Control keys

To do anything other than insert text, the user must use the control keys (the Control key, represented by a "^", pressed in conjunction with an alphabetic key, e.g., ^a) and function keys available on the keyboard (such as Next Page, Prev Page, arrow keys, etc.).

Since not all terminals have function keys, ee has the basic cursor movement functions assigned to control keys as well as more intuitive keys on the keyboard when available. For instance, to move the cursor up, the user can use the up arrow key, or ^u.

^a 	Prompt for the decimal value of a character to insert.
^b 	Move to the bottom of the text.
^c 	Get the prompt for a command.
^d 	Move the cursor down.
^e 	Prompt for the string to search for.
^f 	Undelete the last deleted character.
^g 	Move to the beginning of the line.
^h 	Backspace.
^i 	Tab.
^j 	Insert a newline.
^k 	Delete the character the cursor is sitting on.
^l 	Move the cursor left.
^m 	Insert a newline.
^n 	Move to the next page.
^o 	Move to the end of the line.
^p 	Move to the previous page.
^r 	Move the cursor to the right.
^t 	Move to the top of the text.
^u 	Move the cursor up.
^v 	Undelete the last deleted word.
^w 	Delete the word beginning at the cursor position.
^x 	Search.
^y 	Delete from the cursor position to the end of line.
^z 	Undelete the last deleted line.
^[ (ESC)	Pop up menu.

EMACS keys mode

Since many shells provide an Emacs mode (for cursor movement and other editing operations), some bindings that may be more useful for people familiar with those bindings have been provided. These are accessible via the settings menu, or via the initialization file (see below). The mappings are as follows:

^a	Move to the beginning of the line.
^b	Back 1 character.
^c	Command prompt.
^d	Delete character the cursor is sitting on.
^e	End of line.
^f	Forward 1 character.
^g	Go back 1 page.
^h	Backspace.
^i	Tab.
^j	Undelete last deleted character.
^k	Delete line.
^l	Undelete last deleted line.
^m	Insert a newline.
^n	Move to the next line.
^o	Prompt for the decimal value of a character to insert.
^p	Previous line.
^r	Restore last deleted word.
^t	Move to the top of the text.
^u	Move to the bottom of the text.
^v	Move to the next page.
^w	Delete the word beginning at the cursor position.
^y	Prompt for the string to search for.
^z	Next word.
^[ (ESC)	Pop up menu.

Function Keys

Commands

Some operations require more information than a single keystroke can provide. For the most basic operations, there is a menu that can be obtained by pressing the ESC key. The same operations, and more can be performed by obtaining the command prompt (^c) and typing in one of the commands below.

Menu Operations

Pop-up menus can be obtained by pressing the escape key (or ^[ if no escape key is present). When in the menu, the escape key can be used to leave the menu without performing any operations. Use the up and down arrow keys, or ^u for moving up and ^d for moving down to move to the desired items in the menu, then press return to perform the indicated task.

To the left of each menu item is a letter, which if the corresponding letter is pressed on the keyboard selects that menu entry.

The main menu in ee is as follows:

Paragraph Formatting

Paragraphs are defined for ee by a block of text bounded by:

A paragraph may be formatted two ways: explicitly by choosing the format paragraph menu item, or by setting ee to automatically format paragraphs. The automatic mode may be set via a menu, or via the initialization file.

There are three states for text operation in ee: free-form, margins, and automatic formatting.

"Free-form" is best used for things like programming. There are no restrictions on the length of lines, and no formatting takes place.

"Margins" allows the user to type in text without having to worry about going beyond the right margin (the right margin may be set in the settings menu, the default is for the margin to be the right edge of the terminal). This is the mode that allows the format paragraph menu item to work.

"Automatic formatting" provides word-processor-like behavior. The user may type in text, while ee will make sure the entire paragraph fits within the width of the terminal every time the user inserts a space after typing or deleting text. Margin observation must also be enabled in order for automatic formatting to occur.

Modes

Although ee is a 'modeless' editor (it is in text insertion mode all the time), there are modes in some of the things it does. These include:

You may set these modes via the initialization file (see below), or with a menu (see above).

Spell Checking

There are two ways to have the spelling in the text checked from ee. One is by the traditional spell(1) command, the other is with the optional ispell(1) command.

Using spell, the words that are not recognized will be placed at the top of the file. For the ispell option, the file is written to disk, then ispell run on the file, and the file read back in once ispell has completed making changes to the file.

Printing the contents of the editor

The user may select a menu item which prints the contents of the editor. ee pipes the text in the editor to the command specified by the initialization command printcommand (see the section Initializing ee from a file below). The default is to send the contents to "lp".

Whatever the user assigns to printcommand must take input from standard input. See your system administrator for more details.

Shell operations

Shell commands can be executed from within ee by selecting the shell command item in the miscellaneous menu, or by placing an exclamation mark ("!") before the command to execute at the command: prompt. Additionally, the user may direct the contents of the edit buffer out to a shell operation (via a pipe) by using the left angle bracket (">"), followed by a "!" and the shell command to execute. The output of a shell operation can also be directed into the edit buffer by using a right angle bracket ("<") before the exclamation mark. These can even be used together to send output to a shell operation and read back the results into the editor. So, if the editor contained a list of words to be sorted, they could be sorted by typing the following at the command prompt:

Initializing ee from a file

Since different users have different preferences, ee allows some slight configurability. There are three possible locations for an initialization file for ee: the file /usr/share/misc/init.ee, the file .init.ee in the user's home directory, or the file .init.ee in the current directory (if different from the home directory). This allows system administrators to set some preferences for the users on a system-wide basis (for example, the print command), and the user to customize settings for particular directories (like one for correspondence, and a different directory for programming).

The file usr/share/misc/init.ee is read first, then $HOME/.init.ee, then .init.ee, with the settings specified by the most recent file read taking precedence.

The following items may be entered in the initialization file:

Save Editor Configuration

When using this entry from the settings menu, the user may choose to save the current configuration of the editor (see Initializing ee from a file above) to a file named .init.ee in the current directory or the user's home directory. If a file named .init.ee already exists, it will be renamed .init.ee.old.

International Code Set Support

ee supports single-byte character code sets (eight-bit clean), or the Chinese Big-5 code set. (Other multi-byte code sets may function, but the reason Big-5 works is that a two-byte character also takes up two columns on the screen.)