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Legal stuff:
THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS". THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES OF
ANY KIND WITH REGARD TO THIS MATERIAL, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Neither Hewlett-Packard nor
Hugh Mahon shall be liable for errors contained herein, nor for
incidental or consequential damages in connection with the
furnishing, performance or use of this material. Neither
Hewlett-Packard nor Hugh Mahon assumes any responsibility for
the use or reliability of this software or documentation. This
software and documentation is totally UNSUPPORTED. There is no
support contract available. Hewlett-Packard has done NO
Quality Assurance on ANY of the program or documentation. You
may find the quality of the materials inferior to supported
materials.
This software may be distributed under the terms of Larry Wall's
Artistic license, a copy of which is included in this distribution.
This notice must be included with this software and any
derivatives.
Any modifications to this software by anyone but the original author
must be so noted.
Building the software:
The editor 'aee' may be built on most UNIX systems by simply
entering 'make' at the shell prompt in the directory where
the source is located. The X-Windows version, 'xae', may be
built using the command 'make xae', and both aee and xae may
be built using the single command:
make both
In certain situations, the scripts which do the setup for
the build (normally hidden from the user) may not be able to
find the information necessary to build the code. If this
happens, a message to that effect is provided instructing
the user to try manual steps to build the code. In this
case a certain level of knowledge on the part of the user is
expected. Most of the needed information can be deduced
from the files 'create.mk.aee' and 'create.mk.xae'.
General information:
The editor 'aee' (another easy editor) is intended to be a simple,
easy to use terminal-based screen oriented editor that requires no
instruction to use. The intended audience for aee ranges from
people who are new to computers to experienced software developers.
aee's simplified interface is highlighted by the use of pop-up menus
which make it possible for users to carry out tasks without the need
to remember commands. An information window at the top of the
screen shows the user the operations available with control-keys.
aee allows users to use full eight-bit characters. If the host
system has the capabilities, aee can use message catalogs, which
would allow users to translate the message catalog into other
languages which use eight-bit characters. See the file
aee.i18n.guide for more details.
aee relies on the virtual memory abilities of the platform it is
running on and does not have its own memory management capabilities.
For a text editor to be easy to use requires a certain set of
abilities. In order for aee to work, a terminal must have the
ability to position the cursor on the screen, and should have arrow
keys that send unique sequences (multiple characters, the first
character is an "escape", octal code '\033'). All of this
information needs to be in a database called "terminfo" (System V
implementations) or "termcap" (usually used for BSD systems). In
case the arrow keys do not transmit unique sequences, motion
operations are mapped to control keys as well, but this at least
partially defeats the purpose. The curses package is used to handle
the I/O which deals with the terminal's capabilities.
While aee is based on curses, I have included here the source code
to new_curse, a subset of curses developed for use with aee.
'curses' often will have a defect that reduces the usefulness of
the editor relying upon it.
The file new_curse.c contains a subset of 'curses', a package for
applications to use to handle screen output. Unfortunately, curses
varies from system to system, so I developed new_curse to provide
consistent behavior across systems. It works on both SystemV and
BSD systems, and while it can sometimes be slower than other curses
packages, it will get the information on the screen painted
correctly more often than vendor supplied curses. Unless problems
occur during the building of aee, it is recommended that you use
new_curse rather than the curses supplied with your system.
If you experience problems with data being displayed improperly,
check your terminal configuration, especially if you're using a
terminal emulator, and make sure that you are using the right
terminfo entry before rummaging through code. Terminfo entries
often contain inaccuracies, or incomplete information, or may not
totally match the terminal or emulator the terminal information is
being used with. Complaints that aee isn't working quite right
often end up being something else (like the terminal emulator being
used).
aee, new_curse, and Xcurse were developed using K&R C (also known as
"classic C"), but they can also be compiled with ANSI C. You should
be able to build aee by simply typing "make". A make file which
takes into account the characteristics of your system will be
created, and then aee will be built. If there are problems
encountered, you will be notified about them.
aee is the result of conflicting design goals. While I know that it
solves the problems of some users, I also have no doubt that some
will decry its lack of more features. I will settle for knowing
that aee does fulfill the needs of a large number of users. The
goals of aee are:
1. To be so easy to use as to require no instruction.
2. To have enough functionality to be useful to a large number of
people.
aee is a superset of 'ee', a simplified text editor that is (as of
this writing) available with various free UNIX distributions (Linux
and FreeBSD).
Hugh Mahon |___|
h_mahon@fc.hp.com | |
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