e(1)

📦 version 0.2, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💅 e(1) — the manual page, bestie edition

okay so, this is e(1), from the General Commands Manual. It's a tiny little baddie that invokes your editor, with optional file:lineno handling. Yes queen, that's the whole vibe. 👑

✨ NAME ✨

e — invoke your editor, with optional file:lineno handling 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

e [<editor's options>] <file>[:line] [<file>...]
<pipeline> | e -: [<editor's options>]
<pipeline> | e -:: [<editor's options>]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so picture this: programs that mention line numbers in their messages have mostly standardized on "file:line: Message" or "file:line:col: Message". Gorgeous. Iconic. Except 😭 — that is not what editors support. Editors, almost always, want "+line" and then "file". The mismatch is giving chaos.

So e swoops in like the main character she is. You hand her a list of file names, optionally followed by :line, then possibly a :column and/or an additional colon, and she gives them to your editor. 💖 The line numbers get passed as a separate argument +line before the file name — which is literally what editors expect. Slay.

Alternatively ✨ you can provide file names on the standard input, and specify -: or -:: as the first argument. Here's the tea:

  • -: — lets you do file names without line numbers 🎀
  • -:: — silently ignores anything not in the expected format 🙈

🍓 Examples

git grep FIXME|e -:

make 2>&1 >/dev/null|grep error:|e -::

This is roughly a shorthand for "e pipeline|cut -d: -f1-2".

And ngl, e is also handy as a general-purpose smart alias for running the editor. If yours has a long name like "jstar" or "emacs", you save four keystrokes on what for a typical Unix user is the most often issued command. Four. Keystrokes. That's self-care, fr fr. 💅

👑 EDITOR SELECTION 👑

If the environment variable $EDITOR is set, e will use that. Periodt.

Otherwise, it calls sensible-editor, which asks what editor to use then saves your answer. 💾 And if you wanna get asked again, you can run select-editor to get asked again. 🎀

⭐ tiny reminder bestie: e is the vibe, but $EDITOR is the queen who decides who shows up. 🌈

Signing off 💜 — this lil' page is e(1), dated 2018-08-09, and the source/version is just plain e. That's the whole glow-up, no cap. 🦋✨

📦 where this page comes from