The Hessling Editor

The Hessling Editor (THE) is one of the older open source text editor projects (started in 1990, first released in August 1992 according to its history file). For more than ten years it has been written and maintained by Mark Hessling, who along with being the original author of THE is also a maintainer of Regina, an open source REXX interpreter that has been ported to most Unix platforms.

THE is a text editor modeled on the VM/CMS editor XEDIT, adding the best features of Mansfield Software's Kedit. Among the key features of the editor:

• availability of folding which can be controlled in various sophisticated ways (keyword based, indent based, etc.).

• the use of REXX as macro language.

Folding is controlled by the "all" command. It permits to display and work on only those lines in a file that contain a given pattern. For example, the command: all /string/ will display only the lines that include "string"; any global changes you make on this slice (for example replace string command) will be reflected in the file. (In most cases this is a more convenient way to make global changes in the file.) In order to restore visibility of all lines you need to enter: all (without a target string).

Similar to XEDIT, THE uses IBMs REXX as its macro language, which makes THE highly configurable and versatile. This provides the ability to create powerful extensions to the editor and/or customize it to specialized needs. For example, you could create edit commands that would allow you to manipulate columns of text (e.g. copy/move or insert/delete a column of text within a file). With REXX, you can also integrate OS commands or external functions into an edit session. Since version 3.0, THE also has user-configurable syntax highlighting.

THE is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

It is available for many operating systems: most or all POSIX Unix platforms (as a program for text-mode or native X11); QNX, OS/2, DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP.