Anthony's Editor

"Ae" is my favorite editor for Linux console. The Linux console have lots of basic utility's to manipulate text files, put two files together, break lines at fixed width, search and replace and so on so I don't need an editor that can do a lot of things I need one that is easy and fast in doing a few basic things. 'Ae' is easy, you can start work right away sins all the commands is listed on top of the screen. Basically I use select, cut/copy and paste a lot and that is really easy with 'ae'. The only thing that works a bit deferent from what you might be use to is the copy procedure. press F2, use arrow keys to mark a piece of text, now you cut it with F3, the text will disappear from the screen, but now it is in the buffer. We don't want it to disappear from the screen so immediate we past it again with F4, now it is back on the screen where it was but it is still in the buffer so now we can move to where we want to past it and paste it again. Interesting is also the way it treads lines. Many console editors breaks the lines after say 72 characters to start on a new line. 'Ae' does not do that. It visually breaks the line at the border of the screen but really it does not break the line it keeps it as one long line until you press the 'return' button. The makes editing and re-editing a file much easier if you after you are finished want to break the line into fixed width you can do that with basic Unix utility 'fold' like this:

fold -s -w 72 filename.txt >other-name.txt

If you want to put some thing from an other text file in to your text you insert that file in to your working file with 'ctrl + r' followed by the name of the file and the you just delete what you don't need. The only thing I miss in 'ae' is a search and a search-and-replace option, but I can live with out it. I can close the file and use 'less' (press '/' inside less for search) instead or 'sed'.u 'Ae' used to be in "Debian" (Linux) but they don't have it any more so it is a bit difficult to get hold of it, but some freandly guy called "Grifter" put it out for me on his web site.

http://www.fagotten.org/grifter

http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/ae_962-26_i386.tar.bz2

It is lib6 dependent and it worked just "out of the box" on my VL4 (Linux) with out having to add any libs. I have it in a lib5 version to if you are interested (you'll need that for BL 3)

Instruction plus downloads 'ae' for lib5

For the lib6 version on griffers homepage

Get the tar archive. Unpack it i use 'mc' F2 option for this.
Now you will get a:

ae_962-26_i386 dir.

Under that dir there are three directories bin, etc and usr.
In bin you'll find ae copy that to /bin or /usr/bin. In etc you will find ae.rc copy that to /etc. In 'usr' you will find to more folders 'man' and 'doc'. Go in to 'doc' and here you will find modeless.rc.gz unpack it (gunzip modeless.rc.gz) now copy that file to your home dir (cp modless.rc.gz /home/yourname). Now rename that file ae.rc (mv modless.rc.gz ae.rc). Start 'ae' by typing 'ae' followed by 'enter'. In my case it was not working properly I could type in text but trying to delete to the left with BACKSPACE did not work. It, instead, printed '^?' on screen. Trying to delete to the right with DEL would print '^[[3~'on the screen. Trying to 'block' with F2 would print '^[[[A' on the screen. So i opened the ae.rc file in my home dir (with an other editor that already worked) and i found down to the place where it says:

.delite_left ^H

and I changed that to what the BACKSPACE key prints on the screen

.delite_left ^?

then I find

.delite_right ^X

I changed to what the DEL key prints on the screen

.delite_right ^[[3~

find

.block ^[f2

I changed to

.block ^[[[B

And so on with every key that was not doing what it should, but instead printing some thing on the screen. I saved the ae.rc file in my home dir and tried again and now it worked.

Using ae with X

Now when I start 'ae' in X I have exactly the same problem as I just solved before under the console with some of the keys. The keys have deferent value in console and in X. I can edit the

/home/yourname/ae.rc

in X to make it work just like I did under the console so it will work in X but not under the console. I can also have two ae.rc files one I setup under console and afterward copy that to 'cae.rc' (cp /home/yourname/ae.rc /home/yourname/cae.rc) and one I setup for X and afterward copy that to 'xae.rc' and now when I need the X setup I can get that like this:

cp /home/yourname/xae.rc /home/yourname/ae.rc

And when I need the console setup I can get the like this

cp /home/yourname/cae.rc /home/yourname/ae.rc

and I can make it even easier by making an alias for this. On my system (Slackware based) I add this two lines to the bottom of a file called /etc/profile on other Linux distributions you maybe put it in a file called .bash.rc in your home dir.

alias xae='cp /home/yourname/xae.rc /home/yourname/ae.rc'

alias cae='cp /home/yourname/cae.rc /home/yourname/ae.rc'

So I only need to give the command 'xae' to get the X setup and command 'cae' to get the console setup

/Mikkel

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