Getting Started

Getting Started

This page walks you through your first session with edit: launching it, touring the DOS-style interface, and running the open → edit → save → quit loop.

First launch

# A blank buffer
edit

# Open an existing file
edit notes.txt

If you ran edit previously and exited cleanly, you may be greeted by a session restore prompt offering to reopen your last set of files. Press Y/Enter to restore or N/Esc to start fresh. To skip this prompt entirely, launch with --no-session. (Passing explicit file arguments also bypasses session restore.)

The UI tour

edit recreates the classic EDIT.COM screen. From top to bottom:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ File  Edit  Search  View  Options  Help                                    │  ← Menu bar
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Hello, world!                                                              │
│ This is the editor area on a DOS-blue background.                          │
│ Unicode works everywhere: café, αβγ, 日本語, 🙂                             │
│ █                                                                          │  ← Cursor
│                                                                            │
│                                                                            │
│                                                                            │
│                                                                            │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ notes.txt   UTF-8   LF   Ln 4, Col 1   [+]                                  │  ← Status bar
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

• Menu bar (top) — File, Edit, Search, View, Options, Help. Press F10 to activate it, or Alt+<first letter> to drop a menu open directly (e.g. Alt+F for File). Plugin-provided menus appear between Options and Help. Menus are fully mouse-operable — click a title to open it and click an item to run it.
• Buffer tab bar (below the menu bar) — appears when two or more buffers are open: a one-row strip listing each open file (active tab highlighted, a ● marks unsaved buffers). Click a tab to switch to it, or click its ✕ to close it. With a single buffer there is no tab bar.
• Editor area (middle) — your text, on the classic blue background under the classic theme. An optional line-number gutter can be enabled. The current selection is shown highlighted (reverse video), and scrollbars appear when the content overflows.
• Status bar (bottom) — filename, current encoding (e.g. UTF-8), line-ending style (LF / CRLF), cursor position, and transient indicators such as [WRAP] (soft-wrap on) or a [+]/dirty marker for unsaved changes. Search results, save confirmations, and plugin messages also flash here.

Mouse support

edit is fully mouse-operable (on any terminal that reports mouse events; everything also works from the keyboard). Click to position the cursor, press-drag-release to select, double-click to select a word, triple-click to select a line, and right-click for a Cut / Copy / Paste / Select All context menu. The wheel scrolls the editor, file browser, Help/About, and list dialogs, and the scrollbars are clickable and draggable. Mouse support can be turned off with mouse = false in config.toml.

Basic workflow

Open a file

• Ctrl+O opens the file dialog, or
• pass the filename on the command line: edit path/to/file.

Edit text

Type to insert. Editing is grapheme-aware, so multi-codepoint characters behave as single units.

Action	Key
Undo / Redo	Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y
Cut / Copy / Paste	Ctrl+X / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V
Select all	Ctrl+A
Extend selection	Shift+Arrow
Extend selection by word	Ctrl+Shift+Left / Ctrl+Shift+Right
Delete previous / next word	Ctrl+Backspace / Ctrl+Delete
Indent / Dedent selection	Tab / Shift+Tab

Navigate

Arrow keys move the cursor. Home/End jump to line start/end; Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End to file start/end; Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right move by word; PgUp/PgDn page through the buffer.

Find & replace

• Ctrl+F — Find (interactive dialog; regex supported, matches highlighted, "X of Y" indicator)
• F3 / F2 — Find next / previous (wraps)
• Ctrl+H — Find and Replace (interactive dialog)
• Ctrl+G — Go to Line (type a 1-based line number and press Enter to jump)

Save

• Ctrl+S / F5 — Save
• File › Save As… — save to a new path (via the file browser)
• F12 — Save As Encoding (choose the output encoding from a dialog; see Encodings)

Quit

• Ctrl+Q — Quit. If the buffer has unsaved changes you'll be prompted before exiting.

Next steps

• The complete key map: Keybindings
• Customize themes and behavior: Configuration
• Work with legacy code pages and UTF-16: Encodings