!TITLE ADVICE FOR BEGINNERS To begin with, the Editor will seem a clumsy tool, particularly for those with limited typing experience. Changes which could be marked up on a document in no time take an age to translate into sequences of editing commands to achieve the desired effect. Fluency comes with practice, although editing remains a fiddling business, and mistakes are inevitable. Happily most mistakes are easily recovered from, and in the exceptional case where an edit goes disastrously wrong (for example unintentionally scrambling half the file), the editing session can always be abandoned without losing the original file, so that only the editing time is wasted. With experience, it becomes quite straightforward, and habitual, to edit a file 'sight unseen'. However, for initial learning, it is sensible to use as test data a file with known contents. !PAGE The following procedure is a possible learning programme: (a) Beg or borrow a copy of some text file for experimentation. A suitable length is 30 to 100 lines of text. (b) Obtain a printer listing of the file. (c) At the terminal give the appropriate command to call the Editor to edit the test file (see next section). (d) Use the %Q command to explore the significance of the individual keys, particularly any control keys. (e) Initially use only the location commands to move about the file without altering it in order to gain familiarity with the effect of these commands in detail. (f) Mark up the listing of the file with a few typical 'corrections'. (g) Move back to the top of the file and start applying the corrections one by one from beginning to end. (h) When all the corrections have been applied, close off the edit. (i) Obtain a printer listing of the revised file for re-assurance that the corrections have really taken effect. There are quite a number of individual commands in ECCE, and each has some utility in particular cases. But there are only seven or eight which have a high frequency of use and indeed all editing can be done in terms of these. To begin with it is recommended that attention is confined to the following commands: Move (and Move back) \ cursor movement \ or control key Get and Kill / equivalents Insert and Erase / Find Substitute When these have been mastered, others can be added to the repertoire as the need for them is felt. There are often several ways of achieving the same effect with the Editor. The experienced user usually chooses one that involves least typing, but agonising over the choice can waste more time than is saved. !>