edit9.1

.TH edit9 1
.SH NAME
edit9 \- tiny modal text editor
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B edit9 [FILE]
.SH DESCRIPTION
edit9 is a text editor. It can be used to edit any UTF-8 encoded text file,
whether it is prose or a program listing.
.P
Some minimalistic text editing commands are available to the user and
enumerated below. The main appeal of using edit9 over other, more featureful,
text editors like Emacs, Vi/m, Nano, etc. is that the spartan interface
provides a comfortably predictable tool for authoring text. It does not support
configuration files, undo/redo, or text search. The benefit of this is that the
implementation of edit9 remains small and managable for individual programmers
to study, modify, and extend. As a commitment to this principle, the lines of C
source code used to implement this editor are gt;
Move the cursor to the end of the buffer.
.TP
.B l
Center the display vertically so that the cursor is in the middle of the
screen.
.TP
.B m
Toggle the mark that defines one end of a region. Moving the cursor with a
mark set will define a region that can be processed by additional commands.
.TP
.B c
If a region is active, copy the contents of the region. Only one copy is
stored at a time, so only the last region copied will be accessible by the
paste command.
.TP
.B x
If a region is active, cut the contents of the region. This is effectively
just copying the region and then immediately deleting it afterwords.
.TP
.B y
Paste the most recently copied region at the location of the cursor.
.TP
.B w
Toggle special rendering of whitespace characters.
.TP
.B u
Insert a unicode character at the location of the cursor. The codepoint for the
desired unicode character is entered via the prompt.
.TP
.B Backspace
Delete the character behind the cursor. If a region is selected, then that
region will be deleted.
.TP
.B Newline, space, and tab
These characters can be inserted into the buffer even when in command mode.
.TP
.B 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Pressing a number key in command mode will set the width of the indent that is
inserted when inserting a tab. By default, the indent width is zero spaces,
which means a tab character will be inserted. For nonzero widths, the width
corresponds to the number of spaces inserted when indenting with the tab
character.
.SS Insert mode
.TP
.B Escape
Change to command mode.
.TP
.B Backspace
Delete the character behind the cursor. If a region is selected, then that
region will be deleted.
.TP
.B Other printable characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, etc.)
These characters will be inserted into the text buffer at the location of the
cursor. The cursor will advance forward by one column.
.SH CUSTOMIZATION
edit9 can be customized by editing the source code directly and (re)compiling
it. Basic values are defined at the top of the file; these can be changes
without too much hassle. Customizing the colors used can be done by replacing
the relevant ANSI escape code sequences found at the top of the file.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR emacs (1),
.BR vi (1),
.BR nano (1)