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Starting Edith Pro server on
display :0
. Even though the command will finish immediately, Edith
will continue to run on your display. On any subsequent times you call
the Edith program, instead of starting another copy of the program, the
newly run copy will consider itself a client, send a message to the
copy that is already running (the server), and then exit.
This ensures that all Edith windows on an X display behave coherently; e.g. the panels for changing colours and fonts will apply to all active editor windows. It also helps to avoid editing the same file twice in different windows.
If you want to use Edith as a standard editor, you will want other
applications to run it, like a mailer program. These programs usually
call an editor and assume it will not terminate before the user finished
editing the file. Therefore Edith provides the command line option
-w
-w
is closed. Meanwhile, other
files can be edited without any problems.
Use the special shell script edivisual
for installing Edith as a
default editor; it is equivalent in synopsis to the vi editor, and
in fact, if the DISPLAY variable is not set, e.g. because you are
working from a telnet or modem connection, it will run vi
instead. edivisual
makes use of the -w
option. Another
shell script called edimore
is the counterpart of more; it
makes use of the command line option -c
which merely checks that
the Edith server has loaded the file before exiting.
Expert If you are sharing an X display between more than one user,
you may have problems with file permissions, as the Edith server is
started by user 1, and subsequent Edith calls by user 2 will be sent to
the server started by user 1, which does not have full permissions for
user 2's files. There are two solutions to this problem. The first is
to give each user's copy of Edith a different resource name. To do
this, put the following lines in the different user's
.cshrc
(or similar) files:
/home/user1/.cshrc: alias edith 'edith -name edithUser1'
/home/user2/.cshrc: alias edith 'edith -name edithUser2'
A more rigorous, discouraged approach is to disable the client-server
protocol by specifying the command line option -nofork
.
The editor master panel
The editor master panel is the small window with a menu bar and a
number of icons you see when you start the Edith server by typing
edith
at the shell prompt. During your Edith session, this window
will always be present, be it most likely as an icon.
Command line options
A command line can be given to the Edith program, regardless of whether
the edith server is already running. You can
also type arbitrary command lines in the file selector.
An Edith command line typically consists of a number of file names,
optionally followed by a specification of a position within the file.
Binary files can be opened by prefixing -b
to the file name.
To open a file or URL into a browser window, prefix -l
to
the name of the file or location.
edith /home/wanda/.Xdefaults +35,-12
.Xdefaults
in Wanda's home directory, mark the 35th
line from the top of the file, the 12th line from the bottom of the
file, and move to line 35.
edith .cshrc +/setenv/
.cshrc
, and jump to the first occurrence of
the word setenv in that file.
edith main.c:330
edith main.c:?draw_border?'- '
Opens file main.c
and jumps to the last occurrence of the
word draw_border
in that file.
edith -ba.out
a.out
into a binary editing window.
edith -lhttp://www.nl.net/~zfc/
-display, -iconic, -name
-c
file-w
file-c
, but after opening the file, also wait for its window to
be closed. This corresponds to the way a standard Unix editor
like vi, that doesn't run in the background, works.
-nofork
-c-l
file and -w-b
file are allowed.
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