VEDIT
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| Vedit | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of Vedit 6.15.1 |
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| Developed by | Greenview Data, Inc. |
| Latest release | 6.15.2 / 04 February 2008 |
| OS | Microsoft Windows |
| Genre | Text editor |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | http://www.vedit.com |
Vedit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS from Greenview Data, Inc.
Vedit was one of the pioneers in visual editing[1]. Today, it is a powerful and feature rich general purpose text editor. Vedit can edit any file, including binary files and huge multi-gigabyte files. Still it is compact and extremely fast, perhaps because it is written mostly in Assembly language.
Contents |
[edit] History
- Vedit (Visual Editor) was created by Ted Green in 1979.
- It was commercially published by CompuView in 1980 for CP/M operating system running on 8080 / Z80 based computers.
- When IBM-PC was published, Vedit was one of the first applications available for it in 1982. Versions of Vedit were available for MS-DOS, CP/M-86 and CSP DOS.
- During the following years, versions were developend for OS/2, Xenix, SCO Unix and QNX. On QNX, Vedit was supplied as standard editor.
- Vedit was sold in three versions: Vedit Jr, Vedit and Vedit Plus. Later, the first two were dropped and Vedit Plus was renamed to just Vedit.
- CompuView was shut down year 1989, but a new company Greenview Data continued the development of Vedit starting from 1990.
- The first Windows version (Vedit Plus 5.0) was published in 1997.
- 32-bit Windows version (v5.1) was published in 1998.
- 64-bit Vedit Pro64 was published in 2003. It uses 64-bit addresses and data handling to support files larger than 2GB, but does not require a 64-bit processor or 64-bit OS.
- Development and marketing of Unix, QNX etc. versions were gradually stopped. DOS-version has still been developed in parallel with Windows version and both have the same functions (as much as possible). DOS version is no longer sold separately or supported, but it is still packaged with the Windows versions.
- On February 2008, Greenview Data announced that the old CP/M and CP/M-86 versions of Vedit can be freely shared.[2]
- The latest version of vedit is 6.15.2, dated February 12, 2008.
[edit] Technology
The DOS version of Vedit was written 100% in Assembly language. The exe file size is only 158k.
The Windows version was written mostly in Assembly, but the user interface has been written in C. The size of exe file is 573k, and no DLL's are used.
Vedit uses its own file buffering which is faster than the virtual memory of Windows. In addition, it uses very little of Windows' resources.
Therefore Vedit loads very fast and executes all operations fast. And since it does not hog Windows resources, it does not slow down the other applications either.
[edit] Features
- Vedit can edit any file, including database, binary and EBCDIC files and huge files[3]. The largest file size for standard version of Vedit is 2 GB. Vedit Pro64 can edit files of unlimited size.
- DOS, Unix and Mac files can be edited and are automatically detected.
- FTP editing allows editing files on remote computer.
- Multiple files can be edited using tabbed document interface or Multiple document interface or any mixture of them.
- Vedit has easy-to-use projects. Opening a project automatically loads all the files, file list, settings and session details.
- Vedit's search function supports both regular expressions and its own pattern matching codes (which are faster and easier to use).
- Wildfile function allows you to perform searches, search/replace operations, filtering, run commands or even run complex macros on large set of files on disk recursively.
- Other search functions include Incremental search, Search block/word, Search all buffers, Search all show/select.
- Block operations can be performed using Windows Clipboard or one of Vedit's 100 internal text registers. Or you can copy a block directly to another part of file or to another file. Columnar blocks are supported. A special feature of Vedit is the persistent blocks that stay selected even if you move cursor.
- For programmers, Vedit has features such as syntax highlighting, bracket matching, template editing, auto indent, compiler support, function select and Ctags support. More than 50 programming languages and compilers are supported, and it is quite easy to add more.
- Vedit has powerful C-like macro language. It is interpreted, so there is no need for compiling. This makes it easy to automate your tasks or to add new features to Vedit. In fact, many of the built-in functions of Vedit have been done using the macro language. The macros can be called from a file on disk, or you can add them to User or Tools menu or to any keyboard macro.
- Event macros can be executed automatically, for example on file open and close, mouse double-click etc. These can be used for example for automatic check-out / check-in from revision control systems.
- Special command mode window allows entering any macro command sequence directly, and doubles as on-line calculator.
- Keyboard macros can be recorded or typed in, or you can edit the whole keyboard configuration.
- Vedit is highly configurable with more than 200 settings, most of which can be selected from the Config menu. The keyboard is fully configurable, too.
- Vedit can be installed on and run directly from USB flash drive or CD-ROM.
[edit] Documentation
Vedit comes with comprehensive Online Help and interactive Tutorial.
In addition, there are two PDF manuals: User's Manual (449 pages) and Macro Language Manual (305 pages). The manuals can be purchased as printed books, too.
[edit] Limitations
- Current version of Vedit does not support Unicode editing. However, Vedit can convert Unicode files to Windows or OEM (DOS) character set and vice versa.
- Online Help on current version (6.15.2) is in Windows Help format, which means it cannot be viewed in Windows Vista. (Vista requires HTML Help format.)
[edit] References
- ^ Greenview Data Inc. (2000). 20 Years of Vedit. Retrieved on 2007-12-08.
- ^ Greenview Data Inc. (2008). CP/M Agreement. Retrieved on 2008-03-03.
- ^ Calzada, John (2007). Computer Auditor Processing Tools. State Board of Equalization (California). Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
