• What's New
• General description
• Features
• Installation instructions
• De-installation instructions
• FAQ
• Screenshots
• History
• E-mail for contacts
• Disclaimer

What's New

General description

TED is a multi-purpose text editor with IDE (integrated development environment) features for UNIX-like operating systems. It is not a word processor although it does provide some word processing facilities. TED has no internal restrictions on file length or line length.

TED works:

• on conventional text terminals (e.g. vt100, wyse60), including the terminal emulators (e.g. xterm). Under Linux it uses termcap as a database of terminal capabilities;
• on IBM PC with the full support of mouse, multi-color, various video-modes and scan-codes;
• as a native Xlib application under X Window system.

• The version without X Window system support - works on text terminals, emulators (including "xterm") and IBM PC;
  
  
• The versions with X Window system support - works on text terminals, IBM PC and under X Window system. Executable file automatically recognizes the execution environment or you can explicitly specify it from the command line.

Features

• Intuitive user-friendly interface. It will speed up your work with automatic command and file name completion, default inputs, input history lists, automatic saving/restoring editor configuration feature. Depending on terminal type the editor can support mouse with graphic mouse cursor emulation, multi-color mode, scan-codes, various video-modes and screen font downloading.
• Powerful multi-window system. You can use movable and resizable windows to view and edit different parts of the same document or several documents at a time.
• Customizable multi-level menu system with hot-keys and shortcuts.
• Multiple window search and replace operations, incremental search, full support of regular expressions.
• Various text region operations: copying, moving, deleting, wrapping, formatting, filtering through UNIX commands. TED automatically remembers last 10 text regions in the clipboard. TED supports stream and rectangular text regions.
• Simple formatting facilities: word wrapping and justifying with left and right text margins, automatic word wrapping mode, automatic paragraphs and sentences recognitions, character case conversions.
• C programming language support: construct matching (parentheses, comments, #if/#endif), smart indentation, use of tag files for fast search of function definitions, compilation errors processing, support for full-screen debugging, syntax templates using abbreviations. Construct matching is available and useful with other languages like Java, Perl, Awk, etc.
• Automatic file type recognition. Currently UNIX, MAC and DOS types are supported. You can manually set or change the type of the current file.
• File manager: a powerful tool that can help you organize your files and directories. It implements the basic file operations like copying, renaming, removing, file mode setting, searching for files.
• Interface with UNIX: ability to run any UNIX command and get its results in editor's window. You may also run shell from within editor's window and interact with it, run most of UNIX commands, view and edit their output, send signals to them.
• Standard spell checking program support (spell and ispell). You can check spelling of a single word or whole text. With ispell which is included in all major Linux distributions TED can give you a list of suggestions for each incorrect word.
• On-line context-sensitive hypertext help system available at any time.
• Working with abbreviations, which can be automatically expanded to their full value. You can use abbreviations to store and insert pieces of text you often use. Abbreviations in TED are case-smart.
• Keyboard macros. You can record a sequence of any keystrokes and run it with a single key, save it in file for later use, or bind a macro to any abbreviation.
• Undo/Redo facility. You can define the size of undo buffer yourself.
• Fully redefinable keyboard. You can bind editor's commands and macros to any key sequence to meet your requirements.
• The editor is binary-clean and 8-bit clean.
• Session information recovery after software or hardware failure.
• Bilingual support: if you are using two languages while working in the editor, you can easily switch between them and customize the keyboard layout to your needs.
• Built-in line-mode calculator which supports a lot of mathematical functions.
• Lines, borders, boxes: there is a convenient facility for bordering tables, drawing boxes and lines anywhere in your document.
• Flexible printer support. You can use either standard UNIX print services or direct output to the printer with customizable page formatting and optional font downloading.
• X Window system support. You can operate with mouse, choose any fixed-width font, setup colors in resource file.

Installation

In order to start installation you have to download one of the available variants (which are ZIP-ped self-extracting archives), unzip the downloaded file into a temporary directory, make the unzipped file executable (chmod +x ted.exe) and run it as superuser (root).

The installation program will:

1. Create the directories /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib/ted, if necessary.
2. Put all TED auxiliary files (startup, menu, help, readme, etc) into /usr/local/lib/ted.
3. Put TED executable file (ted or tedx11, depending on selected variant) into /usr/local/bin.
4. Create symbolic link to TED executable in /usr/bin.
5. Set "set user ID" bit in file mode of an executable file.
   In order to access video memory and IO ports of IBM PC video adapter TED must internally switch between priviledged and non-priviledged mode. It doesn't create any security problems. TED can work without superuser privileges but all IBM PC-related features will be disabled.
6. Run "setup" program. You will be able to choose your language (for now, only English and Russian languages are available) and character set, mouse and print settings through simple menu system.

Use may also want to install TED into another directory. To do that you have to set the environment variable TEDLIB to the name of destination directory before you run the installation program:

         export TEDLIB=<your_directory_here>

         setenv TEDLIB <your_directory_here>

De-installation

1. Delete TEDLIB directory:

       rm -rf /usr/local/lib/ted
   

2. Delete the executables:

       rm -f /usr/local/bin/ted /usr/local/bin/tedx11
   

3. Delete symbolic or hard links to the executables (if any):

       rm -f /usr/bin/ted /usr/bin/tedx11
   

4. Delete the personal startup files:

       rm -f ~/.ted*
   

FAQ

Q: If I hold ALT and sequentally press F1, F2, etc. I can switch between virtual consoles, but when I come to TED screen it behaves as if ALT is not pressed. Why?

A: Because (at least for current version of Linux) there is no way to find out the current set of pressed modifier keys (SHIFT, ALT, CTRL) when program's virtual console is being activated. Workaround: You have to release ALT and press it again.

Q: Why does my mouse behave erratically or doesn't work at all?

A: Either you selected an incorrect mouse type (say, Microsoft instead of Mouse Systems) or TED cannot open the mouse device (usually /dev/mouse) because you do not have an access to it or another program like "gpm" runs. Workaround: You may disable mouse support in TED if you run it with option "-mouse".
Additionally, if you're running "gpm" you may use the following shell script in order to start TED:

         gpm -k
         ted $*
         gpm

Q: How to "compile" perl scripts and parse error messages ?

A:

     set-variable compile-command perl -cw !f
     set-variable error-format  at \([^ ]+\) line \([^ ]+\)\|had compilation errors

Screen Shots

Click here to view a couple of TED screenshots taken from IBM PC screen.

History

TED has been developed in 1993-1994 while I was working in the Russian software company Eagle Dynamics Ltd. The editor has a status of commercial product available for various UNIX platforms. In 1996 I've got a permission from the company to maintain a free version of TED for Linux operating system. This fully functional version is distributed in binary-only form and without printed documentation.

E-mail

If you have any questions or comments regarding TED for Linux, please send e-mail to kpdus@yahoo.com.

Disclaimer

Copyright Eagle Dynamics Ltd. 1995, P. Kouznetsov 1997. All rights reserved.

This program is free for commercial and non-commercial use.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY EAGLE DYNAMICS LTD AND PAVEL KOUZNETSOV ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.