Window Concepts

Epsilon displays your buffers to you in windows. You can have one window or many windows. You can change the number and size of windows at any time. You may size a window to occupy the entire display, or to occupy as little space as one character wide by one character high.

Each window can display any buffer. You decide what a window displays. You can always get rid of a window without worrying about losing the information the window displays: deleting a window does not delete the buffer it displays.

Each window displays some buffer, and several windows can each display the same buffer. This comes in handy if you want to look at different parts of a buffer at the same time, say the beginning and end of a large file.

A buffer exists whether or not it appears in some window. Suppose a window displays a buffer, and you decide to refer to another file. You can read that file into the current window without disturbing the old buffer. You peruse the new buffer, then return to the old buffer.

You may find this scheme quite convenient. You have flexibility to arrange your buffers however you like on the screen. You can make many windows on the screen to show any of your buffer(s), and delete windows as appropriate to facilitate your editing. You never have to worry about losing your buffers by deleting or changing your windows.

Epsilon has many commands to deal with buffers and windows, such as creating, deleting, and changing the size of windows, reading files into a buffer, writing buffers out to files, creating and deleting buffers, and much more. We describe these in detail in the chapter "Commands by Topic".

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Buffer Concepts General Concepts Epsilon's Screen Layout