The first thing to learn about an editor is how to exit. ne has a
CloseDoc command that can be activated by pressing Control-Q,
by choosing the ‘Close’ item of the ‘Document’ menu, or by activating
the command line with Control-K, writing ‘cd’ and pressing
Return. Its effect is to close the current document without saving any
modifications. (You will be requested to confirm your choice in case the
current document has been modified since the last save.)
There is also a Quit command, which closes all the documents
without saving any modifications, and a Save&Exit (Meta-X)
command, which saves the modified documents before quitting.
This choice of shortcuts could surprise you. Wouldn’t ‘Quit’ be a
much better candidate for Control-Q? Well, experience shows that
the most common operation is closing a document rather than quitting the
editor. If there is just one document, the two operations coincide (this is
typical, for instance, when you use ne for writing electronic mail), and
if there are many documents, it is far more common to close a single document
than all the existing documents.
If you want to load a file, you may use the Open command, which can
be activated by pressing Control-O, by choosing the ‘Open...’
item of the ‘File’ menu, or by typing it on the command line (as in the
previous case). You will be prompted with a list of files and directories in
the current working directory. (You can tell the directory names because they
end with a slash; they will also appear in a bold face if your terminal
allows it.) You can select any of the file names by using the
cursor keys, or any other movement key. Pressing an alphabetic key will
move the cursor to the first entry after the cursor that starts with the
given letter. When the cursor is positioned over the file you want to
open, press Return, and the file will be opened. If instead
you move to a directory name, pressing Return will display the
contents of that directory.
You can also escape with f1, Escape or
Escape-Escape and manually type the file name on the command
line (or escape again, and abort the Open operation). If you escape
with Tab instead, the file or directory under the cursor will be
copied to the input line, where you can modify it manually. ne also
has file name completion features activated by Tab (see The Input Line).
When you want to save a file, just use the command Save
(Control-S). It will use the current document name or will
ask you for one if the current document has no name. SaveAs, on the
other hand, will always ask for a new name before saving the file.
SaveAll will save all modified documents. If the file you are
saving a document to has changed since you last loaded or saved it,
perhaps because another user updated it while you were editing,
ne will warn you before overwriting the file.
If ne is interrupted by an external signal (for instance, if your
terminal crashes), it will try to save your work in some emergency files.
These files will have names similar to your current files, but they will
have a pound sign ‘#’ prefixed to their names.
See Emergency Save.