Tekstiloj kaj Tekstotraktado


Por tekstoredaktado Unikode kaŭ Esperante, mi rekomendas na UniRed!

Editing/textprocessing is a hobby of mine. Yes, I actually enjoy messing around with these utilities, and have written some small editors in Assembler, Forth and C. I testdrive a couple of unfamiliar ones every month. (Well, not so much anymore. Too busy, and there aren't many new and different ones coming out, and I've pretty much settled on Vim, UniRed and awk for most of my work.) I've added some links below for editors that have their own webpages. See news:comp.editors for current info and help.

If you're interested in some good DOS/Windows editors, check out Vim, PEDIT, TDE, and KaiEdit. For unicians and other power users, Vim is the only way to go. It's a greatly enhanced vi which runs on many platforms. For casual DOS users, PEDIT is a good choice. The look and feel is that of DOS EDIT, but it has been enhanced quite a bit by the author. Another good DOS choice is TDE, which is more powerful than PEDIT (For now, anyway. PEDIT continues to grow, but TDE is no longer being developed. But see FTE.) and has a pulldown menu system for when you can't remember the keystrokes; particularly handy for seldom-used commands. For Windows 95 and later, I also recommend KaiEdit, a German freeware.

The best editor that I've found, and the one that I use on a daily basis, is Vim. It is a superduper vi that runs on just about anything. These are the textprocessing tools that I carry around with me, just in case, and have installed on the machines that I use...

vi, sed, awk... and Vim!


(If you want to skip this vi stuff, click here to read about other editors.)

Let's see... QED begat ed, and ed begat ex, and ex begat vi, which begat many many many wonderful children like Vim! QED also begat qedx and Sam and FRED! Meanwhile, TECO (TECO!!!) was busy begetting EMACS - furrfu!

Some Vim configuration tips


  • In the MS world I use both 16-bit and 32-bit flavors of Vim on several versions of Windows and DOS. Making a single .vimrc/.gvimrc pair that would be smart enough to work with any of those systems might have been fairly straightforward because the has() function can be used to determine Vim version and operating system. But with the 16-bit DOS Vim there is a problem: though dos16 is a valid argument, the 16-bit version doesn't have +eval, so you can't use if and has() to see if you're running the 16-bit version when you're running the 16-bit version! So I created a separate initialization file (_VIMRC16) for the 16-bit version and created an alias for Vim that did a -u _VIMRC16 at startup. But... I later discovered that 16-bit Vim (version 5.6 anyway) treats if much as Vims 4.5 through 5.0 do; it appears to ignore everything in an if-block. Or, one could say, since it lacks +eval, any expression that it can read without complaint results in FALSE anyway, since it doesn't know how to eval. So my solution now is to wrap if 1 and endif around any code that I don't want 16-bit Vim to see. As Kelly Bundy would say... Viola!
  • Although the helpfile says that BufEnter is useful for setting options for a file type, you also seem to need BufNewFile and BufReadPost, which in fact *are* all used in the syntax highlighting code; so I use all three.
  • If a buffer attribute (such as textwidth) is not specified via autocommand, a new buffer inherits values from the active buffer. So if you're setting some attribute via autocommand for certain filetypes, but not all, it's best to define an autocommand that does set some default value for *all* filetypes, and then autocommand(s) to set the values for specific filetypes.
  • Many highlight colors are set by default, so simply saying, for example, gui=reverse, may not do exactly what you expect. Best bet is to set gui=*something* before setting the others.
  • When configuring highlights, set Normal first, because it can affect others; it adjusts background, and some others are dependent on that!
  • If you want the cursor to stay in the same column when you're scrolling, rather than jumping to the first nonblank character in the new current line: set nostartofline.
  • If you set incsearch, Vim will move the cursor to the first match *while you type your search string*. Type another character, or delete one, and Vim shows you the new destination. Way cool. And if you set hlsearch, Vim will highlight all occurrences of a match. Very handy during program development.
  • See set backspace if the backspace/delete key doesn't behave as you'd like.
  • On some systems and/or terminals, set ruler just doesn't work right. Don't worry too much about it. Unless you want to dig into the sources.
  • If you want to stuff a string into myfiletypefile, do a filetype off before and a filetype on after. Setting the value won't have any effect if filetype is on when you do it.
  • Similarly for set background=light or set background=dark; do a syntax off before and a syntax on after. You probably need to bounce syntax for other syntaxy and highlighty things too, but that's the one that bit me.
  • To disable line-number underlining, hi LineNr term=none.
  • For help, :help. Whatever your question, the answer is probably in there somewhere. Sometimes it's just tricky figuring out what to ask.
  • If worst comes to worst, don't panic. Just hit the Escape key a few times and then :qa!.

The Vim Home Page

Vim Online

Vim Online

http://ftp.vim.org

Klarigoj pri Vim

A Reliable Vim Mirror Site

Vi Lovers Home Page

VI-style Editors

Vi Powered! (U.S. Mirror)

VI Helpfile

Mastering the VI editor

xvi

VILE

PVIC

Elvis

bvi

The AWK Manual

Some Vim usage tips


Unless otherwise noted, these tips assume you're in Normal mode.

Miscellany


See Unix Editors for a wonderful in-depth discussion and comparison of many editors and the features that make them unique and/or useful. Heed the warning about vi: please oh please don't try plain old vanilla vi and think that that's all there is to it. Modern vis offer so much more!


Andy's Folding Editors - ae (ascii editor) & be (binary editor).

bvi - An editor for binary files using common vi commands, with additional commands for binary search and substitution. Runs on Linux, SunOS 4.1.x, Solaris 2.x, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, MSDOS. Distributed under GPL, sources available. (Don't forget, Vim does binaries too! But bvi is much smaller and designed for editing of binary files, and also shows byte offsets along the left side of the screen and the ASCII representation along the right side.)

EditPlus - EditPlus is an Internet-ready 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmers editor for Windows. Customizable syntax highlighting. Powerful features for Web page authors and programmers: Seamless Web browser for previewing HTML pages, and FTP commands for uploading local files to FTP server. HTML toolbar, user tools, line number, ruler, URL highlighting, auto-completion, cliptext, column selection, powerful search and replace, multiple undo/redo, spell checker, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more. Price in August 2002 is $30.

Elvis - Vi with some cool extensions like man page display and HTML functionality.

EMACS - A wise man once said that using EMACS to edit a textfile is like using a car to listen to the radio. (Another said that EMACS is a great operating system, but it lacks a good editor.) VI and EMACS really have quite different purposes in life, yet the Holy War rages on. Personally, I'll take VI over EMACS any day for general editing purposes, though it's hard not to like an editor that has ^U, the universal argument, used to execute the command that follows it four times! Still, VI has the dot command, which re-executes the command that preceded it, whatever that was. But not so good when your keyboard has a sticky period. As mine did, once when I hit dd. to delete a line, and then one more line; and then watched my entire file disappear! Fortunately I was using Vim, with "infinite" undo... and a backup file.

FTE - Yet another member of the TDE family (that's ETDE, for you Esperantists!). This one adds mouse support and some other things, but is lacking many TDE 4.0 features. However, it's a work in progress and shows much promise. (Work seems to have progressed nicely since I last visited (it's previous homepage)! Looks quite a bit different though, more Windowy. Featureful!)

JED - A powerful programmer's editor, very nice. I haven't used it much, but I liked it enough to add this link so I can easily keep in touch with it. Available for many platforms. Extensible using S-Lang, a scripting language similar to C.

KaiEdit - An excellent freeware GUI editor for Windows 95 and later. Its language is German but the structure and icons are pretty much what you'd expect in a Windows application, so even if you don't know any German (yet!) it's a good choice. It has some of the features of PFE and some other nice ones of its own, and is an active project, so updates appear periodically. Der Texteditor für Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000!

ned - HYX - Hypertext Tools - As the author warns, this one isn't for everybody. It seems to be oriented toward the creation of a specific type of hypertext environment.

NEdit (Sourcefourge summary page) - The Nirvana Editor for X Windows

NoteTab - Text and HTML editor, NotePad replacement. Multiple files, system-wide searches, multi-line global replacements, spellchecker, thesaurus, text-to-HTML conversion, document templates, bookmarks, and a simple, power-packed scripting language. Available in three versions: NoteTab Light (free), NoteTab Std ($9.95), NoteTab Pro ($19.95).

Personal Editor 32 - The look and feel of IBM's old PE, brought up to date. Cool! I wrote a lot of code back in the '80s using PE (and later, PE2), which was a very nice editor for its time. PE32 adds much useful functionality.

PEDIT - Inspired by DOS edit, but without some of that program's shortcomings. And it includes a spelling checker and thesaurus! Another nice editor for people who want features, but in something friendlier than vi or emacs. And development continues.

PFE - Programmer's File Editor, for Windows 3.11, W95, W98 and NT. Update, 1999.10.28: Sadly, this webpage now simply says: Development and distribution of Programmer's File Editor has come to an end. The PFE Web Site is now closed. I hadn't used PFE very much, since I do most of my work in unix and generally use Vim on all my machines anyway, but this appeared to be an excellent editor for the Windows environment. It can still be found at some ftp sites. PFE 1.01 (the final version) can be downloaded from the IF Archive. Update, 2000.07.11: The PFE webpage now has download links for the final version, available from WinSite and Simtel.

PVIC 1.0 - Freeware VI clone, derived from STEVIE 3.69B, with source, in K&R C.

SEDIT and S/REXX, from Benaroya

TECO Archives

THE, The Hessling Editor - Based on the VM/CMS text editor XEDIT, with features of DOS KEDIT, it uses Rexx as its macro language. Also see the THE Reference and Contributions to The Hessling Editor. (There's lots of information about the XEDIT/KEDIT/THE family of editors at Eastern Orthodox Editors.)

UniRed - (UniRed is a unicode plain text editor. Supports many charsets. Syntax coloring. Search and replace via regular expressions. Able to run auxiliary programs, ISpell for example (for spellchecking).) UniRed estas unikoda tekstoredaktilo por Vindozo 95/98/NT/2000. Ĝi subtenas plurajn signarojn, inter kiuj estas: 16-bita Unikodo (pezokomenca kaj pezofina); UTF-8; vindoza sistema signaro; DOS-a sistema signaro (OEM); Latin-1, Latin-2, Latin-3 ktp; cirilaj signaroj: cp866, windows-1251, koi8-r; kaj aliaj. Permesas uzi HTML-stilajn indikojn de unikodaj simboloj. Sintaksa kolorigo. Serĉado kaj anstataŭigado per regulaj esprimoj. Povas kunlabori kun literumilo ISpell, ebligante kontrolon de ortografio en Esperanto, povas voki eksterajn kompililojn, navigi laŭ strukturo de programo ktp. Vidu ankaŭ SourceForge Project Info for UniRed.

VILE - VI Like Emacs!

WinVi - A freeware windowy vi for 3.x, 95, and NT

xvi - That's the link for the HPUX executable, with sources. The NT version, with sources, can be found at WinSite. The DOS version can be found at Garbo.

Some other places to look for editors...

vi vi vi - the editor of the beast

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VI iMproved!

7 Oktobro 2005 modifita, de Ailanto verkita.
:wq