This book does not cover the use of any particular editor in detail, though we will briefly introduce ae since it is small, fast, and can be found even on the Debian rescue disks, so it pays to know a bit about it for usage in a pinch. When you need to do more serious editing, check out vim or GNU Emacs. Emacs provides an excellent interactive tutorial of its own; to read it, load Emacs with the emacs command and type F1 t. Emacs is an excellent choice for new users interested in a general-purpose or programming editor.
8.3 Using ae
You can start ae by giving it the name of a file to edit, like so:
$ ae filename.txt
This will bring up an editor screen. The top part of this screen provides some quick help; the bottom shows the file you’re editing. Moving around in this editor is simple; just use the arrow keys. You can save the file by pressing C-x C-s and then exit the editor by pressing C-x C-c. Once you feel comfortable with the editor, you can press C-x C-h to turn off the help. That’s it! Knowing this will let you do basic editing. For programming or more detailed editing work, you’ll want to investigate other editors as discussed earlier.
9. The X Window System
This chapter describes the X Window system graphical user interface. It assumes that you have already successfully configured X as described in the Installation Manual (again, the install manual is not yet written; for now you will need to use the XFree86 HOWTO, the contents of /usr/doc/X11, and this chapter). Once you install X, you can enter the X environment by typing startx or via xdm, depending on your choice during configuration.
9.1 Introduction to X
A GUI (Graphical User Interface) is part and parcel of the Windows and Mac operating systems. It’s basically impossible to write an application for those systems that does not use the GUI, and the systems can’t be used effectively from the command line. GNU/Linux is more modular, that is, it’s made up of many small, independent components that can be used or not according to one’s needs and preferences. One of these components is the X Window system, or simply X.
This component is also sometimes called X11. Please note that “X Windows” is not correct.