-.SH FOR ED USERS
-If you have used
-.I ed
-you will find that
-.I ex
-has a number of new features useful on CRT terminals.
-Intelligent terminals and high speed terminals are very pleasant to use
-with
-.I vi.
-Generally, the editor uses far more of the capabilities of terminals than
-.I ed
-does, and uses the terminal capability data base
-.IR termcap (5)
-and the type of the terminal you are using from the variable
-TERM in the environment to determine how to drive your terminal efficiently.
-The editor makes use of features such as insert and delete character and line
-in its
-.B visual
-command
-(which can be abbreviated \fBvi\fR)
-and which is the central mode of editing when using
-.IR vi (1).
-There is also an interline editing
-.B open
-(\fBo\fR)
-command which works on all terminals.
-.PP
-.I Ex
-contains a number of new features for easily viewing the text of the file.
-The
-.B z
-command gives easy access to windows of text.
-Hitting ^D causes the editor to scroll a half-window of text
-and is more useful for quickly stepping through a file than just hitting
-return.
-Of course, the screen oriented
-.B visual
-mode gives constant access to editing context.
-.PP
-.I Ex
-gives you more help when you make mistakes.
-The
-.B undo
-(\fBu\fR)
-command allows you to reverse any single change which goes astray.
-.I Ex
-gives you a lot of feedback, normally printing changed lines,
-and indicates when more than a few lines are affected by a command
-so that it is easy to detect when a command has affected more lines
-than it should have.
-.PP
-The editor also normally prevents overwriting existing files unless you
-edited them so that you don't accidentally clobber
-with a
-.I write
-a file other than the one you are editing.
-If the system (or editor) crashes, or you accidentally hang up the phone,
-you can use the editor
-.B recover
-command to retrieve your work.
-This will get you back to within a few lines of where you left off.
-.PP
-.I Ex
-has several features for dealing with more than one file at a time.
-You can give it a list of files on the command line
-and use the
-.B next
-(\fBn\fR) command to deal with each in turn.
-The
-.B next
-command can also be given a list of file names, or a pattern
-as used by the shell to specify a new set of files to be dealt with.
-In general, filenames in the editor may be formed with full shell
-metasyntax.
-The metacharacter `%' is also available in forming filenames and is replaced
-by the name of the current file.
-For editing large groups of related files you can use
-.I ex's
-.B tag
-command to quickly locate functions and other important points in
-any of the files.
-This is useful when working on a large program when you want to quickly
-find the definition of a particular function.
-The command
-.IR ctags (1)
-builds a
-.I tags
-file or a group of C programs.
-.PP
-For moving text between files and within a file the editor has a group
-of buffers, named
-.I a
-through
-.I z.
-You can place text in these
-named buffers and carry it over when you edit another file.
-.PP
-There is a command
-.B &
-in
-.I ex
-which repeats the last
-.B substitute
-command.
-In addition there is a
-confirmed substitute command.
-You give a range of substitutions to be done and the editor interactively
-asks whether each substitution is desired.
-.PP
-You can use the
-.B substitute
-command in
-.I ex
-to systematically convert the case of letters between upper and lower case.
-It is possible to ignore case
-of letters in searches and substitutions.
-.I Ex
-also allows regular expressions which match words to be constructed.
-This is convenient, for example, in searching for the word
-``edit'' if your document also contains the word ``editor.''
-.PP
-.I Ex
-has a set of
-.I options
-which you can set to tailor it to your liking.
-One option which is very useful is the
-.I autoindent
-option which allows the editor to automatically supply leading white
-space to align text. You can then use the ^D key as a backtab
-and space and tab forward to align new code easily.
-.PP
-Miscellaneous new useful features include an intelligent
-.B join
-(\fBj\fR) command which supplies white space between joined lines
-automatically,
-commands < and > which shift groups of lines, and the ability to filter
-portions of the buffer through commands such as
-.I sort.
projects / unix-history / blobdiff