Every command in ne has a long and a short name. Except in a very
few cases, the short name is given by two or three letters that are the
initials of the words that form the long name. For instance,
SearchBack has short name SB, SaveDefPrefs has the
short name SDP, and AdjustView’s short name is AV.
There are some exceptions however. The most frequently used commands
such as Exit have one-letter short names (X). Also some
commands use a different short name to avoid clashes with a more common
command’s short name. For example, StatusBar’s short name is
ST rather than SB to avoid clashes with
SearchBack’s short name.
A command always has at most one argument. This is a chosen limitation
that allows ne’s parsing of commands and macros to be very fast.
Moreover, it nullifies nearly all problems related to delimiters, escape
characters, and the like. The unique argument can be a number, a string,
or a flag modifier. You can easily distinguish these three cases even
without this manual by looking at what the Help command says
about the given command. Note that when a command’s argument is enclosed
in square brackets, it is optional.
Strings are general purpose arguments. Numbers are used to modify internal parameters, such as the size of a TAB. A flag modifier is an optional number that is interpreted as follows:
Thus, StatusBar 1 will activate that status bar, while I will
toggle insert/overstrike. This design choice is due to the fact that most of
the time during interactive editing you need to change a
flag. For instance, you may be in insert mode and you want to overstrike, or
vice versa. Absolute settings (those with a number) are useful essentially
for macros. It is reasonable to use the fastest approach for the most
frequent interactive event. When a number or a string is required and the
argument is optional, most of the time you will be prompted to
type the argument on the command line.
As for the input line, for numeric arguments you can choose between decimal, octal and hexadecimal notation in the standard way: a number starting with ‘0’ is considered in octal, a number starting with ‘0x’ is considered in hexadecimal, and in all other cases decimal base is assumed.
When a number represents how many times ne should repeat an
action, it is always understood that the command will terminate when the
conditions for applying it are no longer true. For instance, the
Paragraph command accepts the number of paragraphs to format.
But if not enough paragraphs exists in the text, only the available ones
will be formatted.
This easily allows performing operations on an entire document by specifying
preposterously huge numbers as arguments. ToUpper 200000000 will
make all the words in the document upper case. (At least, one would
hope so!) Note that this is much faster than recording a macro with
the command ToUpper in it and playing it many times because in
the former case the command has to be parsed just one time.
In any case, if a macro or a repeated operation takes too long, you can stop it using the interrupt key (Control-\).
To handle situations such as an argument string starting with a
space, ne implements a simple mechanism whereby you can enclose
any string argument in double quotes. If the first non-blank character
after the command and last character of the command line are double
quotes, the quotes will be removed and whatever is left will be used as
the string argument. For example, the Find command to find a
space could be entered on the command line or in a macro as
Find " ". The only case needing special treatment is
when a string starts and ends with double quotes. The command
Find ""quote"" would locate the next occurrence of the string
‘"quote"’ (including the double quotes). However,
Find onequote" wouldn’t require special treatment because the
command argument doesn’t both start and end with a double quote.