Your experience on agora will be much more pleasant if your terminal or terminal emulator emulates a VT220 or better terminal (VT100's are missing a couple of critical features for modem users). "vi" is the standard editor on the system; if you are unfamiliar with it, type "vitutorial" for an introduction. A lot of Unix applications, in particular, many mailers and news programs put you into vi automatically, and many programs will use subsets of the vi command set in their own user interfaces (cursor positioning commands, in particular). pico is available as an "easy to use" alternative to vi, however. To select it as the default, type: csh, tcsh: setenv EDITOR pico bash, sh: EDITOR=pico; export EDITOR Use "elm" instead of "mail" to send/read mail, unless your terminal or emulator does not work properly. In that case, use "mailx", which does not require a smart terminal. "pine" is an alternative to elm, with many of the same features. Use "exit" or "^D" to logout. The default shell (command processor) is "bash" (Bourne Again SHell), and is compatible with AT&T's ksh. If, at a command prompt, you type , you can then use a subset of vi commands to peruse and edit your history, and when you type , what ever is on the command line is executed. For example, to redo the last command, type "k". To redo the last command with a "string" in it, type "/string" (you can also use "r " to do the same thing; "r" works in much the same way as "!" csh). Experiment with it; documentation is found via the man command: man bash There is also a very good book on ksh: The KornShell, published by Prentice-Hall/AT&T. Since bash is a superset of ksh, most of this book will be applicable. Other help can be found via the following commands: apropos whatis man man gopher bash history is retained across login sessions, which is why the history number in your default prompt doesn't get reset. Let me know of problems, comments and questions (send mail to "help" with the command "mailx help"). --Alan (support@agora.rdrop.com)