Invoking Epsilon

You can start Epsilon using the icon created by the installer. If you chose to put Epsilon on your PATH (for Windows, by selecting that option; for macOS, by running the esetup program), you can run Epsilon by simply typing "epsilon".

Epsilon for Windows also includes a Windows Console version of Epsilon, which you can run by typing "epsilonc". The corresponding terminal-based version on other platforms is called "terminal-epsilon", or you can start Epsilon with its -vt flag. On Unix platforms, you can also run Epsilon using the command "lugaru-epsilon", which is handy if your system includes a different and unrelated program also named epsilon.

The first time you run Epsilon, you will get a single window containing an empty document. You can give Epsilon the name of a file to edit on the command line. For example, if you type

epsilon sample.c

then Epsilon will start up and read in the file sample.c. If the file name contains spaces, surround the entire name with double-quote characters.

epsilon "a sample file.c"

When you name several files on the command line, Epsilon reads each one in, but puts only up to three in windows (so as not to clutter the screen with tiny windows). You can set this number by modifying the max-initial-windows variable.

If you specify files on the command line with wild cards, Epsilon will show you a list of the files that match the pattern in dired mode. See Directory Editing for more information on how dired works. File names that contain only extended wildcard characters like , ; [ or ], and no standard wildcard characters like * or ?, will be interpreted as file names, not file patterns. (If you set the variable expand-wildcards to 1, Epsilon will instead read in each file that matches the pattern, as if you had listed them explicitly. Epsilon for Unix does this too unless you quote the file pattern.)

Epsilon normally shows you the beginning of each file you name on the command line. If you want to start at a different line, put "+number" before the file's name, where number indicates the line number to go to. You can follow the line number with a :column number too. For example, if you typed

epsilon +26 file.one +144:20 file.two

then you would get file.one with the cursor at the start of line 26, and file.two with the cursor at line 144, column 20. You can instead specify a character offset using the syntax "+pnumber" to go to character offset number in the buffer.

Windows users running the Cygwin environment may wish to configure Epsilon to accept Cygwin-style file names on the command line. See the cygwin-filenames variable for details.

By default, Epsilon will also read any files you were editing in your previous editing session, in addition to those you name on the command line. See Session Files for details.

If you're running an evaluation version of Epsilon or a beta test version, you may receive a warning message at startup indicating that soon your copy of Epsilon will expire. You can disable or delay this warning message (though not the expiration itself). Create a file named no-expiration-warning in Epsilon's main directory. Put in it the maximum number of days warning you want before expiration.

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Epsilon Tutorial Getting Started Configuration Variables