Buffer Concepts

In Epsilon's terminology, a buffer contains text that you can edit. You can think of a buffer as Epsilon's copy of a file that you have open for editing. Actually, a buffer may contain a copy of a file, or it may contain a new "file" that you've created but have not yet saved to disk.

To edit a file, you read the file into a buffer, modify the text of the buffer, and write the buffer to the file. A buffer need not necessarily correspond to a file, however. Imagine you want to write a short program from scratch. You fire up Epsilon, type the text of the program into a buffer, then save the buffer to a file.

Epsilon does not place any limitation on the number of active buffers during an editing session. You can edit as many buffers at the same time as you want. This implies that you can edit as many files, or create as many files, or both, as you desire. Each document or program or file appears in its own buffer.

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