Starting an exaEdit Session

exaedit [filename]

If you call exaEdit with more than one parameter, only the first one will be honoured and any additional parameter is ignored without further notice. In the section Loading a File you will find an explanation of what the parameter means in detail.

First, exaEdit reads the profile files if one or more exist. This is explicitly explained in section The Profile Files.

Second, exaEdit has to inform itself on the properties of the screen or window used and it has to activate the ways from and to the window. exaEdit is a whole window editor, i.e. exaEdit produces the data for the whole window and - the other way round - the editor can receive changes from anywhere on the window.

In order to fulfill the whole window function, exaEdit uses a complement of the operating system which is called

Curses

This stands for a collection of program functions which are vital to begin, perform and end the usage of the entire window. Since you will prefer the whole window option, exaEdit tests at this stage whether you can use the whole window or not. If this is the case, Curses is initialized.

The remainder of this section refers to Unix systems only.

The most basic prerequisite is the availability of the environment variable

TERM

Environment variables are provided by the operating system. You can ask for a list of them with the Unix command

set

If TERM does not exist, against any expectation, exaEdit displays the following two messages

TERM not defined
exaEdit in line mode

in the window. The first message explains itself, the second one means that exaEdit cannot work in the window mode (i.e. the initialization of Curses is not possible) but only line by line. More detailed information on the line mode is available in The Line Mode.

If the environment variable TERM exists, exaEdit checks the value of the parameter and whether it is appropriate for the window mode. At the moment,

TERM=NETWORK    and
TERM=IBM3278-x

(with any x value) are recognized as inappropriate. In this case exaEdit displays those two messages

Terminaltype is ...
exaEdit in line mode

in the window and continues in the line mode (compare section The Line Mode).

Unfortunately, at the moment it is not possible for exaEdit to recognize all TERM values that are inappropriate for the window mode. So, it may occur that exaEdit tries the initialization of Curses but Curses aborts exaEdit with an error message. Messages of this type look as follows:

Sorry, I don't know how to deal with your `...' terminal.
Sorry, I need to know a more specific terminal type than `'.

But what can you do if exaEdit switches to the line mode - against your will - or if one of the Sorry messages appears? As a solution, you could define the environment variable TERM with the Unix command

export TERM=...

- where you replace the dots by the terminal type you like. If you decide, after you received one of the Sorry messages, to continue work at least in the line mode, you can enter, for example, export TERM=NETWORK.