Back to files

Fred, the FRiendly EDitor

Author: Stefano Busti (asbusti@legend.co.uk)

This is a small, fast(ish) GPL-licensed clone of the standard DOS editor, edit.com. It's designed for small or embedded Linux installations where X-Windows isn't available and ram/disk space is at a premium. Perfect for people allergic to vi, and who don't have enough ram or hours in the day to wait for Emacs to load up :).

It needs the (n)curses library to run, but doesn't require any of the associated libs such as libmenu or libpanel, as I coded my own widget sets for it (see menu.[ch], scrbar.[ch], textbox.[ch], edit.[ch], button.[ch], dialog.[ch] and qkey.[ch]).

See the file INSTALL for installation instructions.

Instructions

fred [file to edit]

Works (kind of) like Dos Edit - use alt/meta modifiers to access the menus. If alt isn't available, you can press escape before pressing the modified key.

BUGS/Caveats in version 0.0.1

It currently won't handle lines longer than 255 characters (in true Dos Edit tradition :)

Don't bother trying to use the mouse to operate the GUI. It won't do anything (yet).

Cut/Copy/Paste is still on the 'to do' list and hasn't been implemented yet.

The current version of Fred silently converts all tab characters in an edited file to the equivalent number of spaces. If you need to preserve tabs, use another editor until I rectify this.

It works best from a standard linux virtual console. It works with varying degrees of success on various x terminals, the main problems usually being non-working special keys, incorrect color scheme and cursors appearing where they shouldn't. Gnome-terminal is the worst offender in this respect.

It's ALPHA software, so there may well be other undocumented bugs. _DON'T_ use it on important files just yet.