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The main arguments you can give to ne
are the names of files you
want to edit. They will be loaded into separate documents. If you
specify --help
anywhere on the command line, a simple help text
describing ne
’s arguments will be printed.
The +N
option causes ne
to advance to the Nth
line of the next document loaded. This option is fairly common among
editors and text display programs like vi
and less
. The
N itself is optional. Without it, a bare +
on the command
line causes ne
to advance to the last line of the first
document. You can specify a line and column as +N,M
. Any
non-digit can be used to separate the N from the M. As it
only affects the next document loaded, it can appear multiple times on
the command line.
The --binary
option causes ne
to load the next document
in binary mode. Binary mode treats the normal line termination
characters as any other character and only breaks lines on NULL
characters. Like +N,M
, --binary
only affects the next
document loaded, and it can appear multiple times on the command line.
See Binary.
The --no-config
option skips the reading of the key
bindings and menu configuration files (see Configuration). This is
essential if you are experimenting with a new configuration and you make
mistakes in it.
The --prefs extension
option makes ne
load a specified
set of automatic preferences, that is, those associated with the provided
extension, instead of the default ones, before loading the first file.
It can be useful, for instance, when piping a file into ne
or when
reading from named pipes, as in those cases there is no file extension
from which ne
can guess the correct preferences. Note that preferences
are cloned from the current document when a new document is created, so if
you open a number of files without extension this option will propagate
to all of them.
The --macro filename
option specifies the name of a
macro that will be started just after all documents have been loaded. A
typical macro would move the cursor to a certain line.
The --keys filename
option and the --menus
filename
option specify a name different from the default one
(.keys and .menus, respectively) for the key bindings and
the menu configuration files. Note that ne
searches for these
files first in the current directory, and then in your ~/.ne
directory.
The --ansi
and the --no-ansi
options manage
ne
’s built-in ANSI sequences. Usually ne
tries to retrieve
from your system some information that is necessary to handle your
terminal. If for some reason this is impossible, you can ask ne
to use a built-in set of sequences that will work on many terminals
using the --ansi
option (to be true, ne
can be even
compiled so that it uses directly the built-in set, but you need not
know this). If you want to be sure (usually for debugging purposes) that
ne
is not using the built-in set, you can specify
--no-ansi
.
The --no-syntax
option disables ne
’s normal syntax
highlighting capability. For most editing situations, this would be
unnecessary, but for extremely large files it may be helpful. Syntax
highlighting incurs small memory usage and processor overhead penalties
for each line of text. The --no-syntax
option eliminates that
overhead. Note that files longer than ten million bytes will have
syntax highlighting disabled by default, but it is possible to re-enable it.
See Syntax Highlighting.
The --utf8
and --no-utf8
options can be used to
force or inhibit UTF-8 I/O, overriding the choice imposed by the system
locale. Note, however, that in general it is more advisable to set the
LANG
environment variable to a locale supporting UTF-8 (you can
usually see the locale list with locale -a
). See UTF-8 Support.
If you need to open a file whose name starts with ‘--’, you can put ‘--’ before the filename, which will skip command recognition for the next word.
Finally, ne
has a global directory where the system
administrator can store macros, default preferences, and syntax
definitions for all users of the system. The location of this directory
is defined when ne
is built, but you can override it by creating
and exporting the NE_GLOBAL_DIR
environment variable prior to
invoking ne
. If you load no files when you start ne
, or
if you invoke the About
command, it will display a splash
screen. The last line on that screen shows the global directory
ne
is using, if it exists, or an error message otherwise.
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