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Epsilon User's Manual and Reference >
Commands by Topic >
Buffers and Files >
Internet Support
Epsilon for Windows or Unix has several commands
and facilities that make it easy for you to edit files on other
computers using the Internet.
The find-file
and dired commands, as well as a few others, understand
Internet URL's. If you do a find-file and provide the URL
ftp://user@machine.com/myfile.c, Epsilon will engage in an FTP
interaction to download the file and display it in a buffer. All of
the Internet activity happens in the background, so you don't have to
wait for the file to download before continuing with your work. In
fact, the file appears in the buffer as it downloads (syntax
highlighted if appropriate), so you can be editing the beginning of a
large file while the rest of it downloads.
Saving a file in such a buffer, or writing a buffer to
a file name that starts with ftp://, will cause Epsilon to send the
file to the remote computer. Upload and download status is indicated
in the mode line, and there's also a show-connections command
(on Ctrl-Alt-C) that shows the status of all Internet activities and
buffers. As in bufed, you can select a buffer and press
<Enter> to switch to it, or press <Escape> to remain in the
current buffer.
FTP URL's work with dired also, so if you do a dired
(or a find-file) on ftp://user@machine.com, you'll get a
directory listing of the files on the remote machine, in a familiar
dired context. Dired knows how to delete and rename remote files,
and sort by size, date, file name or extension. To make Epsilon work
with certain host computers (systems running VMS, for example), you
may need to set the variables ftp-ascii-transfers or
ftp-compatible-dirs nonzero; see the descriptions of those
variables in the online help. Other systems may require you to set
the variable ftp-passive-transfers.
The telnet command lets you connect to a
command shell on a remote computer. It puts you in a buffer that
works much like the Epsilon process buffer, except the commands you
type are executed on the remote machine. Provide a numeric prefix
argument and telnet will connect on the specified port instead of the
default port. Or use the syntax hostname:port for the host name
to specify a different port. You can either use the telnet
command directly, or specify a telnet: URL to find-file.
(Epsilon ignores any username or password included in the URL.)
If you specify an http:
URL to find-file (for example, http://www.lugaru.com), Epsilon
will use the HTTP protocol to retrieve the HTML code from the given
location. The HTML code will appear in an appropriately named buffer,
syntax highlighted. Header information for the URL will be appended
to a buffer named "HTTP Headers". You can tell Epsilon to send its
requests by way of a proxy by setting the variables
http-proxy-server, http-proxy-port, and
http-proxy-exceptions. You can tell Epsilon to identify itself
to the server as a different program by setting http-user-agent.
The Alt-E and Alt-<Down> keys in find-file come in handy
when you want to follow links in an HTML buffer; see Command History for information on Alt-E and Completion & Defaults
for information on Alt-<Down>. Also see the
find-linked-file command on Ctrl-X Ctrl-L.
The command view-web-site on Shift-F8 searches for the next URL
in the buffer. It prompts with that URL, and after you modify it if
necessary, it then launches an external browser on the URL. The
view-lugaru-web-site command launches a browser and points it to
Lugaru's web site. Epsilon for Unix uses a shell script named
goto_url to run a browser. See Web-based Epsilon Documentation. Epsilon
for Windows uses the system's default browser.
The finger command prompts for a string like "user@host.com",
then uses the finger protocol to query the given machine for
information about the given user. The output appears in an
appropriately named buffer.
Standard bindings:
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