When editing multiple files, each file appears in its own window. Button 1 can be used to make a window current. Within the current window, button 1 selects text. Double clicking selects text up to the boundaries of words, lines, quoted text or bracketed text depending upon the text at the point of the double click. Double clicking at the start of a line selects the entire line. Double clicking just inside various forms of brace selects text up to the matching brace, correctly handling nested braces. Button 2 displays a menu of editing commands:

cut

Delete the selected text and save it in the snarf buffer.

paste

Replace the selected text by the contents of the snarf buffer.

snarf

Save the selected text in the snarf buffer.

look

Search forwards and select the next occurrence of the selected text.

Mouse chording is implemented, as in acme(1). Dragging a selection with button-1 held down and then also clicking button-2 cuts the selected text into the Snarf buffer. Clicking button-3 instead of button-2 replaces the selected text with the contents of the Snarf buffer.

Clicking button 3 extracts the whitespace-bounded string around the point of the click and plumbs it to the appropriate application (see plumber(8)).

A brutus console window is always displayed from which new files may be opened or from which existing open files may be selected. Typing

/word

in the console window will search for the character sequence word in the file associated with the current window. Typing

?word

in the console window will search backwards for the character sequence word. If text has been selected in the current window the search begins from the end of the selection if searching forwards and the beginning of the selection if searching backwards. If no text has been selected the search begins from the current insertion point. Typing

linenumber

in the console window selects all the text on line linenumber and moves the window to show the selected text.

SGML

If the first line of a file is exactly:

<SGML>

it is assumed to be in SGML format and the contents are displayed according to some predefined formatting rules. Tags of the form <font.size> are recognised and used to control the visual appearance of text. The font may be one of: Roman, Italic, Bold, and Type giving normal, italicised, emboldened, and constant width text. The size may be one of 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16, and determines the point size of the displayed text.