gedit EDITOR

The "gedit" editor is a screen-based editor that takes advantage of the mouse and all windows conventions. Unfortunately, this means that it cannot be used over a regular ssh connection unless you are using a Xwindows based system (Mac OS, Linux, Unix) and have properly run ssh.

Starting the gedit Editor:
The "vi" editor lets a user create new files or edit existing files. The command to start the "gedit" editor is gedit, followed by an optional filename.

For example to edit a file called new.c, you would type gedit new.c and then return. You can start "vi" without a filename, but when you want to save your work, you will have to tell "gediti" which filename to save it into later.

When you start "gediti" you will see a new window pop up on your screen. The usual menu bar will appear at the top of the screen, with a tools bar below that. Under the tools bar will be the area for one or more files that your are editing. Each file will appear as a named tab in this area. Just click on a tab to switch files.

If you do not see the tool bar with icons for actions such as New, Open, cut, copy and paste, click on the View command at the top of the window and select the Toolbar status box. This will then display the tool bar.

Text editing is accomplished by moving the curser to the location you want, and typing in new text. The backspace key will delete text, either the character to the left of the curser, or any text that you have highlighted with the left mouse button. If you hold the backspace key down long enough, it will delete all characters on the current line, and the start deleting characters on the previous line.

If you want to use gedit over an ssh connection, you must forward your X-windws sesssion. Do this on linux or a Mac by adding the -X and -Y options to your ssh command. Occasionally this is not enough, and you will have to set the DISPLAY environment variable to your machine, and then allow access to your machine with the xhost commandl. For example, if you are on host bin00001 and want to run gedit on host p1, you would login with:
ssh -X -Y p1
and then set your DISPLAY variable in csh as:
setenv DISPLAY bin00001