Several characters together can form a unit, the so-called record. Such a unit can be labelled with a particular end-of-record character or it may be distinguished in some other way from the rest of the other bytes in the computer system; this is not important to us at the moment.
It is much more important to know what a file and an editor are, and how you can change or create a file with the help of an editor. I will explain this to you in the next few sentences on a very basic level.
A file (sometimes also called a data set) is a sequence of records on a data medium (fixed disk, hard disk, CD-ROM, etc.).
As a common rule, a file is displayed in the window in such a way that each record of the file takes one line.
An editor is a program to create or change files. Most of the editors work - as exaEdit does as well - in such a way that they keep a copy of the file in the main memory (central memory, internal memory, working storage, general storage) of the computer.
If you want to e.g. change a file, you call an editor and tell it the file name. Then the editor copies the file from the data medium into the main memory. Usually, the editor displays the data it has stored in the main memory in sections in the window. After that the editor carries out the changes you will specify. The final step is to write all the data from the main memory back to the data medium. Only then the changing of the file is finished.
The copy of a file which is kept in the main memory by exaEdit is called
If you want to create a new file whose data still have to put in, you must start the editor with an empty workfile. Then you type your data and at the end of it you give the command to make a new file out of this workfile, which now contains your data. This example is described more detailed in the section Creating a File after the next section.