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What is a line editor?

A line editor edits a list of text items. Some things are more like a list of lines than other things.

Line-like

  • TODO Lists
  • Grocery Lists
  • Most computer source code. Bash is usually a series of one-liners
  • Most computer configuration files

Somewhat line-like

  • English text. Prose normally has sentences that need line breaks and paragraphs that span many lines of text.
  • Most programming languages, which like English have semantic blocks and lines that run past the edge of the screen
  • ASCII art. While creating it, you might insert rows, but once complete you have a block of rows that must stay together.

Commands

Dedlin has a near-uniparse. Almost all commands can be reduced to the following form:

[start],[end],[repeat][Command][Word][...]

Where [start],[end] is a range of lines of text.

Where [repeat][Command] is a command and how many times it should be executed

Where [Word][...] are string positional arguments of the command.

Command types

Commands either

  • display lines
  • interactively change lines, insert, edit
  • manipulate lines, e.g. delete
  • reorder lines

Implemented Commands

Command Structure

([Range]) [Command] ([Phrase] ([Phrase]))
Range = Start,(End),(Repeat)
Command = [Letter]|Command
Words = "text with spaces" "text with spaces"
Words = text_without_spaces text_without_spaces
Where () means optional.

Commands

A command is either a letter or a word, e.g. I or Insert.

Commands are not case-sensitive.

Edit is the default command.

Ranges

A range is a 1 indexed number. In a 3 line file, the range 1,3 represents all rows

Everything up to the first letter is Range.

If the range is omitted, then either 1 or the entire document is assumed.

A single number is assumed to be a start.

Missing starts are assumed to be 1, so ,3 means 1,3

Features

List, Page, Search. These will display the document or part of it. Only Page increments the current location. Search only displays matching rows.

Insert and Edit. These are the changes that require interactive input.

Copy, Move, Delete, Sort. These shuffle around rows.

Join, Split. These split or join rows based on an optional character.

Transfer. This inserts from disk.

Undo. Undoes last step.

Quit and Exit. These both save and exit. Exit saves without asking, Quit prompts to save if something has changed.