mined is a text editor.
Mined has full support for Unicode UTF8 and CJK (East Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese and Korean) through compatible terminals.
You can start mined with:
mined filename.txt
After mined starts, you will find a mouse compatible screen editor, with a fully customizable and fairly conventional interface with scroll bars.
Mined is always in insert mode, so you can just start typing.
Use the F10 key to activate the drop-down menu bar.
The menu bar displays the “File”, “Edit”, “Search/Go”, “Paragraph” and “Options” menus. However, using the left/right arrow keys, it will be possible to access additional abbreviated menus as: “Display Info”, “Quotation”, “Encoding”, “Merge”, “Text”, “Paste Buffer”, “Indent/Tabs”, “Justified”.
Use F3 to open a file, and Alt+F3 to toggle among several files.
You can choose a relative word wrap (adjustable to the terminal width, or adjustable to a default soft-wrap width, (for example 72 columns) or a hard wrap, which automatically generates lines when you reach such an edge.
Commands are single control characters, or two-key commands starting with the Escape key, plus a collection of function keys (for various keyboards and terminals).
Of particular interest is the “break key” (usually numpad 5 or Ctrl+Space), which expands the effects of certain commands “in the obvious way”; this allows editing without having to remember too many keys.
By default, Mined uses the scroll key for the following functions:
| Ins | Paste |
| Del | Delete/Cut |
| Home | Beginning of Line |
| End | End of Line |
| Page Up | ditto |
| Page Down | ditto |
The numeric keypad functions have other meanings, which can be altered with the break key:
| Numpad 7/Home | Mark Start of Selection. Go to Mark. |
| Numpad 8/Up | Up. Top of Screen. |
| Numpad 9/Page Up | Previous. Beginning of file. |
| Numpad 4/Left | Left. Beginning of line. |
| Numpad 5 | Jump key |
| Numpad 6/Right | Right. End of line. |
| Numpad 1/End | Copy. Add. |
| Numpad 2/Down | Down. Bottom of screen. |
| Numpad 3/Page Up | Next. End of file. |
| Numpad 0/Ins | Paste. Paste between windows. |
| Numpad ./Del | Delete/Cut Add+. |
By default, text selection is done by marking the beginning of the selected sector with the Home key, and the End of the selected sector with the End key (and one moves to the beginning of the line with Shift+Home and to the end of the line with Shift+End). This behavior simulates to a certain extent that of the classic proprietary text editor PC-Write for DOS.
However, this behavior can be altered to select “Window$ style”, which uses Shift+Cursor Arrow combinations.
In this case, we set the Shift selection keyboard option, the functions are more conventional, like the following:
| Shift+Left | Selects character to the left |
| Shift+Right | Selects character to the right |
| Shift+Control-Left | Selects word to the left |
| Shift+Control-Right | Selects word to the right |
| Shift+Up | Selects line up |
| Shift+Down | Selects line down |
| Shift+Ctrl-Up | Selects to beginning of previous paragraph |
| Shift+Ctrl-Down | Selects to beginning of next paragraph |
| Shift+Home | Selects to beginning of line |
| Shift+End | Selects to end of line |
| Shift+Control-Home | Selects to beginning of text |
| Shift+Control-End | Selects to end of text |
| Shift+PageUp | Selects previous page |
| Shift+PageDown | Selects next page |
| Shift+numpad5 | Copies selected text to paste into buffer |
Mined allows alternative input methods, suitable for writing in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Kazakh, Ethiopic, Amharic, and Esperanto. It also has the multiple input variations for the scripts of the Chinese and Korean peoples (Pinyin, Cangjie, WuBi, Boshiami, Radical and Brush Script, 4-Edge Script, Bopomofo), as well as the Japanese hiragana and katakana. Mined also has an ideogram translator (English only).
But in addition to paying attention to Asian characters, it allows it to work perfectly well with universal and other previous encodings. This compatibility makes it suitable for dealing with text editing for different types of machines.
While we can alter the way Mined works through the respective menus, its main aspects can be altered more permanently by modifying its complete and guided configuration file ~/.minedrc.
Please check the mined online manual.