SCOUG OS/2 For You - January 1995

QEdit for OS/2

by Tom Suter

In reviewing QEdit for OS/2, Version 3.0 from SemWare Corporation, let's first talk about what this program is not intended to do. It is not designed to be a major competitor for a full-featured word processor such as DeScribe or WordPerfect. QEdit does have many of the features of a word processor, such as word-wrap and spell-check, and if your writing needs are fairly basic it might be satisfactory. However, if you want to do anything more elaborate such as using footnotes, inserting graphics, or formatting text as bold face or italics, you'll definitely want to look elsewhere. So why would anyone want to use QEdit? Quite simply - in my opinion it is a truly superb text editor.

If you are a programmer, you probably need an editor which will produce ASCII files for your compiler. If you use an off-line mail reader for e-mail you also need to generate ASCII files, and in each case you may wish to run a spelling check against your file. Under OS/2 you could use a regular word processor for these functions, but this would be as clumsy and inconvenient as bringing in a farm tractor and plow to help plant the garden in your back yard.

QEdit excels in a number of areas

For me the most important of these is the ease with which it can be configured to work the way you want. Have you noticed how it seems that every new piece of software you use expects you to learn a different set of keyboard commands? The CUA interface of OS/2 is of some help in this regard, but in some cases you may not prefer even the "standard" keystrokes. Having used WordPerfect for 13 years, I've developed automatic responses to editing tasks which I would prefer to use, rather than taking the time to unlearn old habits, unless there is a definite advantage in doing so.

With QEdit, a simple and straight-forward text file is used to define the entire keyboard to fit your way of working. Sample Keyboard Definition files are included to help you emulate a number of the old standbys such as WordStar and WordPerfect, so that you can be productive immediately with QEdit. Personally, I felt the emulation of WordPerfect offered room for enhancement, so I spent a couple of hours expanding the Keyboard Definition file to fit my personal desires and specific needs. This was easily accomplished since the commands are fairly intuitive words which are listed in the documentation, and learning the key definitions takes only a few seconds.

The Keyboard Definition file consists of a list of configurable keys and the commands or macros which are assigned to them. The configurable keys are on the left side of the file, with the commands or macros assigned to the keys on the right. Blank lines and lines starting with an asterisk are ignored and the definitions are case insensitive.

Control keys are specified by a "^". For example:

 ^f1 or ^F1           specifies Control + F1
 ^c  or ^C            specifies Control + C

Alternate keys are specified by the "@" symbol. For example:

 @c  or @C            specifies Alt + C
 @PgUp                specifies Alt + PgUp

Shift keys are specified by a "#". For example:

 #f1 or #F1           specifies Shift + F1

Multiple commands and/or text may be assigned to a key by simply placing multiple commands after the key. There is also a provision for assigning commands or macros to a "twokey." A twokey consists of two distinct keystrokes, such as "Ctrl B" immediately followed by "A". (Can we assume they were thinking of WordStar users when this capability was added?)

The format of a line in the Keyboard Definition file is simply the keystroke followed by the command. If a twokey is to be defined, the two keystrokes are separated by an underline character. So if you are a longtime WordPerfect user, you might create definitions such as:

 f1                   UndoCursorline
 f2                   Find Pause Return "I" Return
 f4                   Copy
 f5                   EditFile "*.*"
 f7                   Exit
 @f2                  FindReplace
 #f3                  NextFile
 #f5                  InsertDate
 #f6                  CenterLine
 ^f1                  Shell
 ^f2                  SpellCheck
 grey+                EndScreen
 grey-                BegScreen
 home_cursorup        BegScreen
 home_cursordown      EndScreen
 ^home_cursorup       BegFile
 ^home_cursordown     EndFile
 cursorup             CursorUp
 ^cursorleft          WordLeft

In addition to the ability to configure the keyboard, QEdit allows you to customize almost anything you can imagine, such as the screen colors, printer options, tab settings, etc. QEdit also allows you to configure the date and time formats and offers various printing options, such as specification of top and bottom print margins, assignment of the print device, ability to adjust line spacing, and inclusion of line numbers. If you prefer the use of pull-down menus as an assist, QEdit also gives you that means of doing your work.

From my perspective, one of the major strengths of QEdit is its speed. I first encountered QEdit as a DOS shareware program a number of years ago when I was using an 8088 clone. The difference between the performance of QEdit and other editors I looked at was awe-inspiring. Then, all that kept me from sending SemWare a check was that it could only edit a file which fit into the first 640K of memory, and I often needed to handle larger files. The OS/2 version will edit files up to the size of the virtual memory of OS/2, so that limitation is a thing of the past.

In my opinion, any good editor or word processor must have a reasonably good macro capability to help automate repetitive tasks. QEdit's macro facility allows you to create macros that will execute a series of commands and keystrokes by pressing a single key. In addition to a recording capability, it offers a simple macro scripting language. QEdit includes the ability to load and/or execute macros from the command line, as well as an option to execute an automatic start-up macro. The macro language is rich enough to support conditional logic (Jump, JTrue, JFalse commands).

Among the other features of QEdit is its multi-file editing capability. The number of files you can edit is limited only by available memory. QEdit also enables you to view files through up to eight horizontal, resizable "windows." You can have multiple views of the same file or view a different file in each window. It provides up to 99 scratch buffers for cut-and-paste or template operations and you can select a buffer from a pick-list of your current scratch buffers. QEdit also saves deleted words, lines, and blocks in a deletion buffer for later recall.

One feature which can prove convenient is the ability of QEdit to load multiple files from the DOS command line, with or without wildcard characters. It also allows you to specify up to six default file extensions for use when loading files and determining tab settings. A number of other features of assistance to programming are also included. For example, QEdit provides "C mode," which provides automatic indentation for programming in the "C" language. It can also generate and locate matching braces and parentheses, which is very useful for entering and maintaining source code.

You can also execute command-line compilers from within the editor, using QEdit's macro facility, and QEdit offers a command-line option for jumping to a specific line number within a file upon loading. Example macros are included which demonstrate automating the process of saving a file, exiting, running your compiler, and loading the resulting error message file so that your debugging process is almost as efficient as if you were in an integrated environment which uses an editor configured specifically for you.

One nice touch which QEdit offers is its support of OS/2 attributes. When you create a new file in QEdit, when you first save it a dialog box with a pick list will appear which asks you to specify the type of file attribute which should be attached to the file. You can specify the file as Plain Text, System File, FORTRAN, etc. Long file names are also supported, which can be a big plus for those who use them regularly.

Naturally, there are some limitations

After all of my praises for QEdit, let's talk about its weaknesses. Perhaps the most obvious of these is that QEdit does not support a mouse. Personally, I'm not much for mousing around, as may be obvious from my enthusiasm for QEdit's great keyboard configuration capabilities. However there are times when a mouse can be an asset and QEdit would benefit from the addition of this feature. SemWare offers another product called TSE (The SemWare Editor) which includes this feature along with a number of other enhancements to QEdit, but it is not available in an OS/2 version at this time.

The spell checker is another area in which I would like to see an improvement. Although it is quite fast, has a good dictionary, and in general works extremely well, I wish that it offered the option of changing the default action when an unrecognized word is found. I frequently use words or names which are unique to that document and which do not warrant adding to the dictionary. If the default could be changed to "Skip," a simple press of the Enter key would speed me through the spelling check more quickly.

In Conclusion

What is my overall impression of QEdit? I think this can be summarized by mentioning that I'm enough of a fan of QEdit's virtues that - in addition to its other uses - QEdit is now installed as the System Editor on my computer.

If you are interested

QEdit is available from SemWare Corporation, 4343 Shallowford Road, Suite C3A, Marietta, GA 30062-5022. Orders only (800) 467-3692, 9am - 5pm ET; other voice calls (404) 641-9002 9am - 5pm ET; FAX (404) 640-6213; BBS (404) 641-8968.

SemWare is offering a discount to members of recognized user groups. The normal price for QEdit is $79, but if you order as a SCOUG member there is a 25% discount, so the price will be $59.25.

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