Finding your way in Sun Solaris

Window manipulation

- Should be less friendly than Windows or Mac but I hope you can manage

Terminal (Unix) applications

- you will need to run a number of applications in the Terminal (similar to Windows Command Prompt). Find the Terminal in Utilities
- You will need more than one terminal window. To open a new terminal window chose File/New Shell when Terminal is active
- The terminal, (and emacs below) have file name self completion. Just type the first 1-2 letters of a file name and press Tab, the name will be completed automatically.
- if you get lost in the file system directories, type cd ~ (cd space tilda) to come back to your home directory
- don't type the same command many times! You can press arrow-up or arrow-down to navigate through the previous commands that you gave.
- some unix file-related commands

cd dir to change directory
Tab while writing a file/directory name auto-completes it so you don't have to type it all
ls to list a directory (dir in Windows)
pwd prints the working directory
mkdir dir to make directories
rm filename to delete a file (del in Windows)
rmdir dirname to remove an empty directory
more filename to view the contents of a text file (but better open it in emacs, see below)

Text editors

- up to now the best text editor for programming i could find on the Macs (or Windows) is emacs. Type "emacs" in the terminal
Emacs is not very friendly with beginers but it's worth learning to use it. If you get to like it, there is emacs for Windows and for many other platforms.

ctrl-x ctrl-f to open a file (or create a new file), ctrl-x ctrl-s to save it, ctrl-x ctrl-w to "save as", ctrl-x ctrl-c to exit.
you can open more files (called buffers in emacs). ctrl-x b to switch to another buffer, ctrl-x k to close (kill) a buffer. ctrl-x ctrl-b to see all buffers, ctrl-x 1 to see just one buffer, ctrl-x 2 to see 2 buffers, etc. ctrl-x o to switch to the next visible buffer
Tab to align a program line nicely (in Java files)
ctrl-a to go to the beginning of the line, ctrl-e to go to the end of the line, ctrl-v one page down, esc v one page up
ctrl-d to delete the character to the right (Delete key on windows), ctrl-h to delete to the left (Backspace works as well)
ctrl-k to cut lines, ctrl-y to paste them
ctrl-s to search text. The search is incremental, you will like it.
whenever you get lost in emacs commands, just press Esc 3 or more times until it says "Quit". That means that you gave up whatever you wanted to do when you went wrong and now you can start new commands.
find out more about emacs. Here is the official site

- a simpler text editor is pico, it has on-screen help. Just type pico. You can only edit one file with pico so you will have to open more Terminal windows (Meta-n)

Logging in from home

You can use KTelnet or Putty to log in from home on any of the Konsthallen or Grå machines (for example konst01.nada.kth.se, grey05.nada.kth.se). Login on any machine, no matter on which you worked in the lab. Then you will be able to use the machine as if you opened a terminal. It is good practice to run the command kauth just after you logged in.

I am having problems using Backspace in emacs over KTelnet. Instead of pressing backspace, move to the left with the <- arrow and then press ctrl-d to delete to the right instead of deleting to the left.