ISPF Editor Cheatsheet

Initially created on 15.10.2025

Today I stumbled upon an old GitHub repo and GitHub page that I created for a very niche text editor: the ISPF Editor¹. I am very much into modal text editors. I love using vim, vi, Emacs etc.

As I am fascinated by mainframes and worked in this field for a few years (this was such an interesting and great time), of course, I looked into different editors on z/OS. Apparently, I didn’t find any well written cheatsheet for the ISPF Editor, so I made my own.

As this is just a markdown file that is automatically deployed as a static HTML file via pandoc, I can append the cheatsheet directly here.

The following commands can be issued in the line number column (just type over the line numbers).

Commands

There are two different ways to issue a command:

command field for general commands
line command, which is entered over the line numbers

Commands

command	explanation
`res`	reset
`col`	display column
`caps on/off`	capitalize
`save`	save data set
`sub`	submit job
`hi`	bring up highlighting dialoge

Line Commands

command	explanation
`i`	insert line
`o`	overwrite line (from previously copied or moved line)
`a`	insert above (from previously copied or moved line)
`b`	insert below (from previously copied or moved line)
`c`	copy line
`r`	repeat line
`m`	move line
`x`	exclude/hide line (hide line for the current editor session)
`f`	unhide line
`(`	shift line to left
`)`	shift line to right
`<`	shift line to left, but respecting the mask
`>`	shift line to right, but respecting the mask
`uc`	make uppercase, block command is `ucc`
`lc`	make lowercase, block command is `lcc`
`mask`	set mask (using < character as start and > as end point)
`bounds`	display current bounds

Modifiers

repeat: COMMAND#, for example i10 to insert 10 lines
before/after: adding a or b to apply the command before or after the current line
block alteration: COMMANDCOMMAND to start the block and COMMANDCOMMAND to end the block, for example cc to start the block to copy and cc to end it.

ISPF stands for Interactive System Prodictivity Facility and is a software run on IBM Z systems. And yes, it has its own text editor. ↩︎