xref: /dports/editors/e93/e93/README

e93 version 1.4r2 (X Windows version)
http://www.e93.org

Todd Squires
Core Technologies
215 N. Valley Hill Rd.
Bull Valley, IL 60098
(squirest@e93.org)

What is e93?
---- -- ---

e93 is a portable window based text editor oriented to the needs of
programmers. It was begun in 1993 (thus the name). It uses the mouse,
selections, cut/copy/paste, and closely follows the model of editors
on the Macintosh and NeXT platforms.

e93 is portable to environments other than Unix/X Windows -- as long as
those environments support virtual memory.

e93 supports columnar selection. It achieves this by allowing multiple
pieces of the text to be selected simultaneously (this is perhaps its
most unique feature).

e93 imposes no limits on the line length, file length, or number of
simultaneous files which it can edit.

e93 is able to handle all 8-bit binary codes without complaint, or
confusion.

e93 is highly configurable without recompiling because scripts which
control the editor can be written in Tcl.

e93 supports user-configurable syntax highlighting.


To Install
-- -------

Please read "LICENSE.TXT" if you agree with it, follow
the instructions given in the file "INSTALL."


What's the deal with those version numbers?
------ --- ---- ---- ----- ------- --------

The version numbers in e93 work as follows:

e93 1.4r2X means:

Major version: 1    If it is ever rewritten, this will increment, and the
                    numbers below will be reset to 0.
Minor version: 4    If really significant changes are made, this will increment.
Revision:      2    Any change will cause this will increment.
Machine:       X    X windows implementation.


Additional Information
---------- -----------

The material README.regex is taken from The GNU Emacs Manual, 9th edition.
Copyright 1985, 1986, 1987, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
and from the GNU regex library version 0.11.
Copyright 1992 Free Software Foundation, Inc.


Mail From e93 Users
---- ---- --- -----

Mail me useful tips, and I will place them here so that
other users can benefit from them.

From: Michael Zuelsdorff <micha@dolbyco.han.de>
Subject: e93 on german linux box

The only problem I ran into was my German keyboard. You
might know, that we have Umlauts and other special characters
instead of all those brackets and braces. My solution are
some additional lines in my e93rc.tcl:

bindkey 7      {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\{"};
bindkey 8      {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\["};
bindkey 9      {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\]"};
bindkey 0      {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\}"};
bindkey ssharp {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\\"};
bindkey q      {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\@"};
bindkey plus   {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "\~"};
bindkey less   {00100000000} {InsertAndHome [ActiveWindowOrBeep] "|"};
----------------------------------------------------------------

Please send all bug reports to squirest@e93.org. (Todd Squires)

Release of 1.4r3
------- -- -----

Cleaned up some math that wrapped around when buffers grew larger than
2GB. Scroll bars, etc should now all handle 4GB buffers.

Added the control key as a selection modifier. When holding the
control key and clicking in the document, it is now possible to easily
make multiple disjointed selections.

Got rid of cache of top level X window that was associated with each
editor window. This was used to keep track of windows when the WM
reparented them, but breaks when the WM is restarted, or a new WM
is started. Instead, the code now hunts windows the hard way whenever
it might be dealing with something that was reparented. This is slower,
but shouldn't break as easily.

Modified clipboard handling to export both XA_PRIMARY, and XA_CLIPBOARD
to get along with more applications when cut/copy/pasting.

Release of 1.4r2
------- -- -----

Added XSetClassHint calls to the various windows to help the Gnome
Window List applet to figure out that all of our windows belong to the
same class (so it groups them correctly).

Added support for Xinerama (multiple head displays). e93 will now pick
the 0th display as the "primary" one, and will open windows and menus
on that display.

Release of 1.4r1
------- -- -----
Sun Jan  4 18:25:40 CST 2009

I had some time to play with e93 over the holiday. It had been a while
since I had done any serious messing with the code.

The new version of the X11 libraries that came with FC10 contain an
assert if an application calls back into X from within a predicate
routine. It turns out this is not allowed. The "XCheckIfEvent" man
page says:

"Your predicate procedure must decide if the event is useful without
calling any Xlib functions."

e93 had an errant case of this which triggered the assert. The problem
has been corrected.

All of the C variables called "theWhatever" have been renamed to just
"whatever". Adding the "the" before variable names was a bad habit
which I have broken since e93 was written, and I had always meant to
go back and get rid of them. They're all gone now.

The long-ago-broken-and-never-fixed user abort code has been repaired.
It is now possible to hit 'escape' while a Tcl script is running, or
while the editor is busy performing a search, and have the process
abort. This is trickier than it seems, so if you notice any problems
with it, be sure to let me know.

Tk was removed from the editor. On some machines, Tk made the editor
slow to load, and it never was really used very effectively anyway
(mainly used for the about screen). If this really bothers anyone, let
me know. It would not be incredibly hard to add back, but I'd probably
work to make it a build option.

Windows and dialogs have been made to update using an offscreen
buffer. This reduces flicker as e93's windows are updated. The result
should look cleaner than before without much of a performance hit.
This change helps especially with window managers that do live updates
as windows are resized.

The code which draws the text cursor has changed. Previously, e93
tried hard to manage the cursor outside of the usual invalidate/update
mechanism that is used for all other screen updating (it used XORs to
draw the cursor to the screen). This made sense in the days of old, as
it was much more efficient. However, on modern machines the code
complexity of the old method makes no sense given how little it
matters speed-wise. Now the cursor is drawn just like everything else.

Previously each editor window had its own graphics context. This was
not necessary. Now there is only a single graphics context that is used
for all drawing.

Dialogs have been modified so that they can be sized. The editor does
not yet remember the last size you asked for, not does it yet allow
you to specify the size when they are opened, but I'll eventually get
around to making those changes.

Error handling has been improved.

Release of 1.3r5
------- -- -----
Mon Dec 22 16:05:31 CST 2008

Ok, I admit it. I had been upgrading my kernel happily without ever
upgrading my Linux distribution (I have been using Fedora Core 2 for a
very long time). Anyway, I finally decided it was time to upgrade to
FC10. The upgrade brought with it a new version 4 gcc compiler, and a
new version of the Metacity window manager.

Both found reasons to complain about some of the things e93 was doing.

IMHO, only gcc had any right to complain. Metacity wrongly decided to
start ignoring XRaiseWindow requests... I'm sure the author thinks it
was a good idea. It wasn't. One day, I would enjoy having a chat with
him about it.

Also, I've been sitting on a bunch of other little fixes given to me
by various folks (especially Michael Manning (thanks, and sorry for
taking so long to get these out)).

So, here it is. No new features have been added. Just compile fixes
and a few minor tweaks.


Release of 1.3r4
------- -- -----

A bug in shellcmd.c which could cause 2 error messages to be output
when the "setcolors" command was passed an invalid color was fixed --
thanks to Michael Manning for pointing this out.

Gordon J Milne added some missing keywords to the C syntax
highlighting rules.

Makefile was modified to link against libstdc++.

Fixed a bug in Replace where the selection would be corrupted
after a replace Tcl script failed.

Added a check in xgui/misc.c to check to see if a window has
children before deleting the child list -- thanks to Fred Allen
for pointing that out.

Mouse wheel support added -- also thanks to Fred Allen.

Default fonts for all the various editor functions may now be
specified in the startup scripts. Thanks to Adam Yellen for this
change.

"extract" Tcl function was added -- Thanks to John Duncan for the
suggestion.

New syntax maps added courtesy of Michael Manning.

Modified the C Get Prototypes menu item to improve recognition of
certain kinds of prototypes.

Removed support for paletted displays -- colors are no longer
allocated and freed. If you are still running in 8 bit color
mode, you need help.

Renamed a bunch of types to make them easier to read and more
consistent with my current programming style.

Added some new Tcl commands to the editor for manipulating
marks in the text. Also added ability to have marks be visible
in the view.

Removed some outdated Tcl commands, and changed the names of some
others. e93rc.tcl and other scripts were modified accordingly.

Release of 1.3r3
------- -- -----

A variable called "not" in regex.c was changed to a new name, since
"not" is a reserved keyword in 'C', and new compilers have started to
complain.
(Thanks to Adam Yellen, and Mark Maxon)

The version of Gnome shipping with RedHat 7.0 did not like the way
that dialog windows were being set up and was causing an inability
to click in them. dialogs.c was modified to solve the problem.

The following changes are thanks to Michael Manning:
    Unnecessary "strings.h" was removed from includes.h.
    Tcl commands: setmodal and getmodal were removed in favor of a
      more transparent method of determining when a grab has occurred.
    Dummy version of ShellCommand added to make errors in the startup
      script a little less catastrophic.
    fromfile was removed from the Tcl script GetDefaultStyleInfo
    The about box was changed so that it no longer calls "uname" making
      it more portable.
    Some other problems were corrected in the startup script.

Michael Manning also contributed the docsource directory which
contains the beginnings of some real documentation for e93.

Adam Yellen supplied some icons (in the e93lib/images directory) which
can be used for Gnome or KDE.

Adam also supplied the "colorme.tcl" module which can be used to
dynamically modify the background color of editor windows.

channels.c was changed to account for a change in the Tcl_ChannelType
data structure. (Thanks to everyone who reported this.)

Release of 1.3r2
------- -- -----

e93r was modified to allow files to be piped to it on its stdin.
(Thanks to aweigp@autelca.ascom.ch)

Setlocale is called at startup to allow keyboard input to work in other
parts of the world. (Thanks to y_kozlov@chat.ru)


Release of 1.3r1
------- -- -----

Fixed a crash bug which happens when replacing using tcl script as the
replacement text, and the script is using "puts" to write to another buffer.

Fixed a problem with closing stderr in Tcl which was causing e93's
stderr to be closed as well -- this caused no error messages to be
generated.

Removed EDITORUNIVERSE concept -- folded it into EDITORBUFFER.

Modified smart-open to take "# include" (with whitespace between
the # and the include).

Added private color map handling for X windows. If the
environment variable E93_COLORMAP exists, e93 will use a private
colormap. Otherwise, it shares the system's default color map.

Many thanks to Peter TEX Weigand <aweigp@autelca.ascom.ch> for the following changes:
    Modified Makefiles for easier multi-platform configuration
    Added "install-strip" target to Makefile
    Added SA_RESTART for Solaris in xgui/events.c
    Added "Modified" icon for documents
    Moved start-up scripts to "lib" instead of "bin"
    Added vertical scroll-bar left/right-hand preference "scrollbarplacement"
    Added "PrintWindows" command to e93rc
    Modified e93rc mail command to use "sendmail" instead of "mail"
    Added "subject" to mail dialog in e93rc
    Added "MailWindows" menu item to e93rc
    Enhanced "buffer info" dialog box
    Enhanced find-selection so that empty selections work better
    Enhanced modules/c.tcl so that prototype location is more robust for different coding styles
    Updated the README.e93 document (BIG THANKS!)
    Added .src to the extensions recognized as assembly code
    Removed errno and sys_errlist from errors.c
    Created "e93r" script for remote execution -- this allows you to pass files to a running e93
    Fixed "dirty" flag so that it tracks the "undo" status of a buffer


Release of 1.2r8
------- -- -----

Changed the way e93 finds and runs its startup scripts.

Added the long awaited Syntax Highlighting.

Changed the way e93 internally deals with fonts and colors.

Modified the way e93 internally deals with selections.

Added < and > to regular expression matcher to allow matches on
word boundaries.

Changed regular expression matcher to allow empty groups (as this
helps with the syntax highlighting rules).

Modified text drawing to allow fonts with characters which overhang
their cell boundaries (such as serifed and italic fonts) to work
without having the overhanging portions clipped.

More code formatting changes.

Bug fix: Reverting to a document which contained 0 bytes did not
work correctly.

Bug fix: When doing a replace, the cursor did not always end up
in the correct spot.

Modified task code to keep e93 from using pause() to give time
back to the system when tasks have data for the editor. This resulted
in a 30% speed increase when reading task data into buffers on fast
machines.

Allowed menu key definitions to be overwritten by subsequent menu
definitions.

Added "the Hand" function to the middle mouse button to allow
easier text movement.

Changed .e93rc to show modified files in the "Choose window" dialog.

Changed .e93rc to remember the contents of some dialogs across invocations.

Changed the function of SHIFT-Arrow keys to work more as expected:
previously, the selection was always expanded. Now, it expands and
contracts in a more intuitive way.

Changed the columnar paste algorithm:
OLD way: delete all selections in document, paste columnarly.
NEW way: paste each selection of the clipboard over each selection in the
document until we run out of selections in the clipboard or document.
If there are no more selections in the document, then paste the remaining
clipboard selections columnarly. If there are no more selections in the
clipboard, delete the remaining selections in the document.

Changed behavior of the horizontal scroll bar so that it is possible
to scroll the text beyond the right-most position dictated by the
thumb. This makes it possible to see and edit the ends of very long
lines, but does add a small bit of strangeness to the behavior of the
scroll bar.

Changed the way the editor homes the view when text is being sent to
a buffer from a task. Now, the editor will not scroll horizontally
when it homes. This makes it much easier to see what is happening
when tasks dump long lines into the view.

Allowed the escape key to be used to abort searches and scripts.

Release of 1.2r7
------- -- -----

Code formatting changes.

Some problems with SIGALRM fixed under Linux and IRIX.


Release of 1.2r6
------- -- -----

The fallback font list (fonts e93 looks for when it cannot locate the
one it really wants) has been changed. This was done to make e93
behave better on machines that do not have b&h fonts.

Opening and closing of e93's menus has been made slightly more
efficient. This was done to make it faster with some window managers
(like fvwm) which tend to behave very slowly when e93 changes the size
of its menu window.

The open and save dialogs have been changed slightly to make them
more friendly.

The startup procedure which reads the .e93rc file has been improved to
handle some error cases in a more friendly way.

4 new Tcl commands have been added:

  buffervariables
  setbuffervariable
  unsetbuffervariable
  getbuffervariable

These allow variables to be created which are local to any given buffer.
This will make it much easier for Tcl scripts to hang information off
of a buffer, and reference it later.

Finally, .e93rc has been changed in the following way:

Checks were added to see if the modification time of a file has
changed while the file was being edited. (Warning you that another
application did something to the file).

Capitalization of function names has been standardized.

The open selection command has been improved to handle globbing, and
selecting the cursor line to open if no selections exist.

Open Clipboard was added to the Edit/Clipboards menu.

Release of 1.2r5
------- -- -----

Some minor cleanup to code calling Tcl.

Some bugs related to reporting errors at inopportune times were
located and removed. These usually showed themselves during very low
memory conditions.

Double click timer is now reset in the file dialog boxes. Clicking
rapidly on the file list now works as expected.

The initial delay before repeated scrolling/paging with scroll bars
has been lengthened slightly.

The allowable delay between consecutively typed characters in list
boxes has been lengthened slightly.

A bug in the menu code was removed. The bug was caused by clicking
multiple mouse buttons at the same time while tracking menu items.

The directory dialog has been modified to show only directories.
Previously it also showed files.

Color handling has been altered so that named colors are now
recognized. Previous to this, all colors had to be specified as 6 hex
digits RRGGBB. Now, if a machine supports color names, e93 will also
accept them.

.e93rc was modified:
  Strip EOL Whitespace and line termination functions were added.
  Align Left was added.
  "About" was slightly modified.
  Color names were added.
  Line Wrap functions were added.

Characters with diacritical marks such as umlauts and other special
characters which are contained in the upper half of the character set
will now be displayed properly by e93. Previously, any character above
0x7F would have been displayed as its hexadecimal equivalent. e93 will
now use the character contained in the current font (as long as it is
not of 0 width, in which case, it will display the hex equivalent as
before).

Two new relative cursor movement modes have been defined:
STARTPARAGRAPH and ENDPARAGRAPH which will move the cursor to the
start or end of a paragraph. These modes can be used with the
following commands:

movecursor
delete
expandselection
reduceselection


Release of 1.1r4
------- -- -----

.e93rc was modified:
  Mark, Directory and C menus were added. Some more cleanup.
  Views menu became Windows menu. Printing menus were added.

All dialogs were modified to handle error conditions more
consistently.

The Ok dialog was modified to wrap text instead of drawing it off the
edge.

Open/save file dialogs were modified to handle more cases. Also a "/"
was added after all items in the dialogs which point to directories.

A new Path selection dialog was written, and a Tcl command
(pathdialog) was added.

Menus were modified so that you do not have to hold the mouse button
down while making menu selections. You can now click on the various
submenus one at a time to make a selection. This is more consistent
with most window managers, and easier to use.

Text routines were sped up by adding a cache mechanism that allows e93
to locate positions in the text more quickly. The speed increase
should be especially noticeable when editing large files (>1MB).
Assuming you have enough virtual memory, e93 should now be able to
edit very large (<2GB) files without a noticeable slow down.

When treating replacement text as a Tcl script, 10 new variables (in
addition to $found) are available if the search string was a selection
expression: $0 - $9 are now set to the \0 through \9 matches of the
selection expression.

A bug that caused a rare memory leak related to search and replace was
found and fixed.

A bug in realpath2 that caused extra '/' characters to appear in its
output was fixed.

The clipboard interface with X windows has changed. Previously, e93
used the clipboard mechanism to import/export to the X windows
environment. However, most X windows applications do not use the
clipboard. Instead, they use the X selection mechanism. Users
complained that they could not easily communicate with programs that
used only the selection mechanism (most programs). So, e93 now does
the following to support communication with other X applications:
Whenever text is copied into e93's current clipboard, e93 takes
ownership of the current selection. If another application does a
"paste selection" (many use the middle mouse button for this) while
e93 owns the selection, the application will get the text in e93's
current clipboard. Conversely, If another application owns the current
selection, attempts to paste from the current clipboard within e93
will cause it to copy the selected text from the current selection
owner into the current clipboard before pasting. This all seems
somewhat convoluted, but since e93 supports multiple selections
simultaneously across multiple windows, and X does not, this is the
best solution I can currently offer.

The editor startup scheme was modified so that it looks for the .e93rc
file in your home directory first, but if it is not found, it will now
also look through the path given by $PATH in its environment. As soon
as it locates a .e93rc file that it can open, it will execute it and
stop looking. A Tcl global variable SCRIPTPATH is set to the path of
the script that is executed.

The font selection dialog was written. It is better than what it
replaces (a dialog that made you type in the font you wanted) but it
still could use some work.

Release of 1.0r3
------- -- -----

The increment of the minor version number (1.0->1.1) indicates lots
of changes.

.e93rc was modified:
  Some new functions added, some old ones cleaned up slightly. The
  "unknown" function was modified so that if it launches a task that
  wants input from stdin, it will get an EOF, instead of hanging
  e93.

README.e93 was written, as a first cut at a manual. Read it, if you
have suggestions, let me know. There is a lot more to do in this
arena, but I hate writing documentation, so this is it for a while.

A proper open/save file dialog was written. It is kind of different.
Let me know how you like it.

There is also a new listdialog function which allows choices from a
Tcl list. This dialog was used to implement the new "Windows..." menu
function.

Dialog management has changed significantly.

Color handling was improved, so the editor should not just quit if it
cannot get colors at startup. The new behavior is to just get either
black, or white depending on which color is closer to the one asked
for.

Tasks are now hung off of buffers, instead of windows as they were
previously. This allows for tasks to be running in buffers which do
not have associated windows.

EOF can now be sent to a task by closing the input pipe.

Task error handling has been improved.

A speed governor was installed on all scrolling items so you folks
with screaming fast machines will not have things scrolling so fast as
to be annoying. This should not slow down slow machines.

LOTS of minor source code changes.

Release of 1.0r2
------- -- -----

.e93rc was modified:
  Some defaults were made easier to change.
  Error reporting during file save functions was improved.
  Menu names were made more consistent.
  Some features were added to the "Misc" menu.

The call to the library function "realpath" in xgui/misc.c was
replaced by a call to a new internal routine "realpath2" which does
the same thing. This was done for those machines that do not include
"realpath" in their libraries.

Release of 1.0r1
------- -- -----

xgui/includes.h was modified to include <sys/time.h> because some
machines require it.

Two bugs in keybind.c were found and corrected.

Error reporting at init time was enhanced so that users would know if
e93 failed to start up because of a lack of available colors.

Startup script execution has been changed so that the editor will not
startup if it cannot locate the startup script.

The default .e93rc was slightly modified to change the colors of some
windows.

guidefs.h was modified to get rid of an array of 0 length that
offended some compilers.

Release of 1.0r0
------- -- -----

The makefile was altered to get rid of -L$(LIB) in the link line which
was causing trouble.

killpg in xgui/tasks.c was modified to kill(-pid...) because some
systems do not have killpg.

xgui/events.c was modified to make sigaction a little more portable.

The clipboard is now imported when the editor starts.

A new Tcl command called "version" was added to allow users to find
out which version of the editor they are using.