Introduction (ne’s manual)

Next: Basics, Previous: Top, Up: Top [Contents][Index]

## 1 Introduction

`ne` is a full screen text editor for UN*X (or, more precisely, for POSIX: see Motivations and Design). I came to the decision to write such an editor after getting completely sick of `vi`, both from a feature and user interface point of view. I needed an editor that I could use through a `telnet` connection or a phone line and that wouldn’t fire off a full-blown LITHP1 operating system just to do some editing.

A concise overview of the main features follows:

- three user interfaces: control keystrokes, command line, and menus; keystrokes and menus are completely configurable;
- syntax highlighting;
- full support for UTF-8 files, including multiple-column characters;
- 64-bit file/line length;
- simple scripting language where scripts can be generated via an idiotproof record/play method;
- unlimited undo/redo capability (can be disabled with a command);
- automatic preferences system based on the extension of the file name being edited or regex content matching;
- automatic completion of prefixes using words in your documents as dictionary;
- a file requester with completion features for easy file retrieval;
- extended regular expression search and replace à la `emacs` and `vi`;
- a very compact memory model—you can easily load and modify very large files, even if they do not fit your core memory;
- editing of binary files.

#### Footnotes

##### (1)

This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an ‘`s`’ in its character set; users must substitute ‘`th`’. LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth.