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ae

Anthony's Editor ae is an exceptionally small program (23.9K) that provides basic edit capability for the rescue disk and the base system. The default condition for the editor is with the help screen visible. This is one of the features that makes this editor so easy to use.

The current release of Debian uses slang1 instead of ncurses, because the library is much smaller, allowing other things to go on the boot file system. To accommodate the new library constraints, and to give ae functionality on many terminal types, the key-bindings have been changed to be more like emacs. Most keys are control keys, with some use of the escape key. For those terminals without an escape key, <ctrl-[> will act as an escape.

All of the possible commands available in the editor are displayed on the screen. <ctrl-X$><$ctrl-H> will toggle the help screen off and on to provide more screen area for editing. The standard commands are:


\begin{hanging} \item{\^{ }X I} Read a file into the editor. \item{\^{ }X\^{ }S}... ...Q} Exit the editor without saving the file first. Discards changes \end{hanging}

ae is the only editor available in the base system, so until the system is upgraded to ``standard'' there may not be an editor available that is completely familiar. ae is the compromise between size and familiarity.

next up previous contents index
Next: joe Up: Appendix 2: Text Editors Previous: Introduction   Contents   Index
Dale Scheetz