Tekstiloj kaj Tekstotraktado

Por tekstoredakti Unikode kaŭ Esperante, mi rekomendas na UniRed kaj Simredo!

A couple of new editors to keep an eye on are Neovim, forked from Vim in 2014, and Atom, a hackable text editor. Also SpaceVim, a community-driven Vim distribution, and Spacemacs, a community-driven Emacs distribution which combines features of Emacs and Vim.

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, 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. Another good DOS choice is TDE, though it is no longer being developed, but see FTE. 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...

• Vim is my editor of choice. I use it daily on a variety of systems. And, naturally, I'm using Vim right now to update this page.
• awk - Unix has its own version(s). On x86 machines I use Rob Duff's program.
• ed - An old standby. Unix has its own version(s). On x86 machines I use a version which appears to have originated on comp.os.minix, and then passed through several hands before landing in mine. (I, of course, made a few changes of my own.) Very handy for batchprocessing.
• kzap - Excellent for hacking binary files on DOS systems.
• sed - Unix has its own version(s). On x86 machines I use a program originally called sedmod.exe; it's a hacked version of GNU sed. Beware: there are some seds out there that don't handle the -g switch and/or the g operator properly, One spits out an infinite? number of RE error messages if you do, for example...
  
  sed -e "s/\t/ /g" < input.txt
  Then there's at least one that fixed that bug, but but doesn't handle...
  
  sed -e "s/ /\t/g" < input.txt
  properly. Look for SEDMOD.
• sled - A small but surprisingly featureful editor for DOS. In many ways sled reminds me of IBM's old PE. Of course, this command set may have been pretty common during the eighties, and I've seen several other editors that are reminiscent of PE. Having used PE quite a bit back then, many of these commands seem intuitive to me even now. This is a nice editor to place on machines for new users, or to use when nostalgia strikes on one of those late autumn afternoons when you're sitting in the dining room with your laptop on the table and cool red-orange sunlight filters in through the drapes to dimly light the room around you.
• TDE (http://adoxa.3eeweb.com/tde/index.html) - The source of the TDE family, ETDE for esperantists and FTE for mousers. This is an excellent editor for general use by those who want many features but in something friendlier than vi or emacs. And with the addition of the pulldown menus, very easy to use. Development of TDE appears to have ceased, but fte is active.
• xvi - Another member of the vi family, and one of the ancestors of Vim. Development appears to have stopped several years ago (perhaps due to Vim), but I often find xvi on Unix systems and the occasional DOS system. And maybe further development wouldn't be a good thing for xvi anyway - xvi simply adds a few very handy features (like multiple windows) without becoming bloated.

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

These are rather old, there may be better ways for some of them now.

• 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!.

Some Vim usage tips

These are rather old, there may be better ways for some of them now.

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

• Strip trailing blanks from all lines in a file.
  \s means whitespace, \+ means one or more ...
  :%s/\s\+$//
• Search for lines and write them to a file.
  This one's kind of tricky. You need the >> (append) because :g is a linewise thing; if you don't append, you end up with only one line, the last one found; but if the file doesn't already exist, append will fail, so that's why you need the ! ...
  :g/{pattern}/.w! >>{file}
• Insert today's date, ISO format "yyyy-mm-dd".
  You'll probably want to put these mappings in your vimrc file so you don't have to type them in every time. In Insert mode, it does an actual insert. In Normal mode, it overwrites ten characters from the current cursor position; this was intentional. You could make it insert instead, but I generally use it to update a timestamp and wanted it to overwrite the old one ...
  nmap ;dd R<C-O>"=strftime("%Y-%m-%d")<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR><ESC>
  

  imap ;dd <C-O>"=strftime("%Y-%m-%d")<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR>

• Insert today's date in long format "day monthname year".
  You'll probably want to put these mappings in your vimrc file so you don't have to type them in every time. In Insert mode, it does an actual insert. In Normal mode, it changes the next three words from the current cursor position; this was intentional. You could make it insert instead, but I generally use it to update a timestamp and wanted it to replace the old one ...
  nmap ;dD 3cw<C-O>"=substitute(strftime("%d %B %Y"),"^0","","")<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR><ESC>
  

  imap ;dD <C-O>"=substitute(strftime("%d %B %Y"),"^0","","")<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR>

• Insert today's date in long format "day monthname year", in Esperanto.
  You'll probably want to put these mappings in your vimrc file so you don't have to type them in every time. In Insert mode, it does an actual insert. In Normal mode, it changes the next three words from the current cursor position; this was intentional. You could make it insert instead, but I generally use it to update a timestamp and wanted it to replace the old one. I created a function to generate a date-string in Esperanto, and then use that function in my mappings ... (I have a smarter version now.)
  function! EsperantoDatestamp(...)
  let Month01 = "Januaro"
  let Month02 = "Februaro"
  let Month03 = "Marto"
  let Month04 = "Aprilo"
  let Month05 = "Majo"
  let Month06 = "Junio"
  let Month07 = "Julio"
  let Month08 = "Augusto"
  let Month09 = "Septembro"
  let Month10 = "Oktobro"
  let Month11 = "Novembro"
  let Month12 = "Decembro"
  let YearNumber=strftime("%Y")
  let MonthNumber=strftime("%m")
  let DayNumber=strftime("%d")
  let DayNumber = substitute(DayNumber,"^0","","")
  execute "let Stamp = \"" . DayNumber . " \" . " "Month" . MonthNumber " . \" " . YearNumber . "\""
  return Stamp
  endfunction
  

  nmap ;de 3cw<C-O>"=EsperantoDatestamp()<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR><ESC>
  

  imap ;de <C-O>"=EsperantoDatestamp()<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR>

• Insert today's date in long format "day. monthname year", in German.
  You'll probably want to put these mappings in your vimrc file so you don't have to type them in every time. In Insert mode, it does an actual insert. In Normal mode, it changes the next three words from the current cursor position; this was intentional. You could make it insert instead, but I generally use it to update a timestamp and wanted it to replace the old one. I created a function to generate a date-string in German (using HTML entities for the special characters because HTML is where I use it), and then use that function in my mappings. (In Normal mode, my original version changed the next *four* words, so that I could readily handle the Punkt for the ordinal ending. Then I decided to use three Words but this caused problems in HTML when those Words were followed immediately by a tag. Then it failed when March rolled around, because of the character entity. So, much as I wanted to avoid doing so, I decided to modify iskeyword on the fly and then restore it when finished.) (Don't ask me why I'm executing echo in the keyword commands; I don't remember why, and it seems to work without. If you can figure out why it's needed, let me know. I suspect it was leftover from debugging, and if I was sure about that I'd get rid of it. But maybe I needed it to work around something at one time, a problem with an earlier version of Vim or with one of the machines I'm using. I dunno.) ...
  command Saveiskeyword let iskoriginal = &iskeyword | echo
  

  command Restoreiskeyword let &iskeyword = iskoriginal | echo
  

  function! GermanDatestamp(...)
  let Month01 = "Januar"
  let Month02 = "Februar"
  let Month03 = "M&auml;rz"
  let Month04 = "April"
  let Month05 = "Mai"
  let Month06 = "Juni"
  let Month07 = "Juli"
  let Month08 = "August"
  let Month09 = "September"
  let Month10 = "Oktober"
  let Month11 = "November"
  let Month12 = "Dezember"
  let YearNumber=strftime("%Y")
  let MonthNumber=strftime("%m")
  let DayNumber=strftime("%d")
  let DayNumber = substitute(DayNumber,"^0","","")
  execute "let Stamp = \"" . DayNumber . ". \" . " "Month" . MonthNumber " . \" " . YearNumber . "\""
  return Stamp
  endfunction
  

  nmap ;dg :Saveiskeyword<CR>:let &iskeyword="a-z,A-Z,48-57,&,;,."<CR>3cw<C-O>"=GermanDatestamp()<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR><ESC>:Restoreiskeyword<CR>
  

  imap ;dg <C-O>"=GermanDatestamp()<CR><ESC><C-R>=<CR>

• Some handy little HTML keys.
  Another bit of code for your vimrc: Though I do a lot of Web coding, most commands and functions and mappings and abbreviations seem more trouble than they're worth; easier just to type the stuff in, and if they're rarely used I forget them anyway. But something I did find handy was defining F5 to wrap some bold tags around selected text, and F6 to wrap some italic tags around selected text. And for those non-HTML occasions, I set F6 to NOP and F5 to put stars around the text, a common Net convention for textual emphasis, for which I invented the term splatbolding...
  autocmd BufEnter,BufNewFile,BufReadPost * vmap <F5> <ESC>`>a*<ESC>`<i*<ESC>`>2l| vmap <F6> <NOP>

  autocmd BufEnter,BufNewFile,BufReadPost *.htm,*.html,*.php,*.php3,*.php4 vmap <F5> <ESC>`>a</b><ESC>`<i<b><ESC>`>7l| vmap <F6> <ESC>`>a</i><ESC>`<i<i><ESC>`>7l

• Mappings for insertion of Esperanto numerical character references (Latin 3) into HTML code.
  In Insert mode, these mappings insert the appropriate numerical character reference.
  In Normal mode, they replace the character under the cursor ...

  (Actually nowadays I use this, a somewhat smarter mechanism. By default, it maps the keys for x-convention (which is, yeah, kinda silly because it's easier to just type the x; I never use it), but if you enter :EONCR 3 it remaps them for Latin 3 and if you enter :EONCR 8 it remaps them for UTF-8. (I also use the EONCRCS variable to modify the behavior of my Esperanto datestamper appropriately, like this.)

  (Actually, nowadays I use a keymap like this or this.))

  nnoremap ;^C s&#198;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^C &#198;
  nnoremap ;^c s&#230;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^c &#230;

  nnoremap ;^G s&#216;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^G &#216;
  nnoremap ;^g s&#248;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^g &#248;

  nnoremap ;^H s&#166;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^H &#166;
  nnoremap ;^h s&#182;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^h &#182;

  nnoremap ;^J s&#172;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^J &#172;
  nnoremap ;^j s&#188;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^j &#188;

  nnoremap ;^S s&#222;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^S &#222;
  nnoremap ;^s s&#254;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^s &#254;

  nnoremap ;^U s&#221;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^U &#221;
  nnoremap ;^u s&#253;<ESC>
  inoremap ;^u &#253;

• Mappings for insertion of German character entities into HTML code.
  In Insert mode, these mappings insert the appropriate character entity.
  In Normal mode, they replace the character under the cursor ...
  nnoremap ;"A s&Auml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"A &Auml;
  nnoremap ;"a s&auml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"a &auml;

  nnoremap ;"O s&Ouml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"O &Ouml;
  nnoremap ;"o s&ouml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"o &ouml;

  nnoremap ;"U s&Uuml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"U &Uuml;
  nnoremap ;"u s&uuml;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"u &uuml;

  nnoremap ;"s s&szlig;<ESC>
  inoremap ;"s &szlig;

• Reselect the previous selection.
  
  gv

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!

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.

• JOVE - Jonathon's Own Version of EMACS.
  
• Jasspa MicroEmacs - An older MicroEmacs has been revived and enhanced, and can run on many different platforms.

Esperantilo - programo por redaktado de tekstoj kun specialaj esperantaj funkcioj, ortografia kaj gramatika korektiloj kaj maŝina tradukado

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.

JOE → JOE - JOE is a full featured terminal-based screen editor which is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). JOE has been around since 1988 and comes standard with many Linux distributions.

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!

nano - GNU nano aims to emulate Pico while providing extra functionality.

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.

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

SEDIT and S/REXX, from Benaroya

Simredo - Ĝava Unikoda redaktilo. pri versio 4.3: facila instalo por Vindozo, Linukso, kaj Mak OS X - limigita subteno por stilaj dokumentoj (RTF-formato) - konvertado de pli ol 100 signokodaroj al Unikodo - facile uzebla klavmapa funkcio, por ŝanĝi klavaranĝon - subteno por lingvoj kiuj kuras maldekstren, kiel la araba - menuoj kaj mesaĝoj en: la angla, Esperanto, la franca, la greka, la hinda, la soraba - literumilo por la angla lingvo, Esperanto kaj Latino - kriptiga funkcio - rapida vekiĝo, literumilo por Latino, pluraj problemoj korektitaj.

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 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, a text editor that attempts to combine the best aspects of Emacs and vi.

vi vi vi - the editor of the beast

$$$###

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?