The stedi editor




This editor was originally developed for the Atari-ST computer. In its first version it was written in Motorola 68000 assembler language (1986). In this version it became part of the commercial package CRAFT for the Atari-ST together with the GP-shell. In 1987,1988 it was ported to the C language and vastly extended. Later (1991) it was ported to the NeXTstep operating system and made to run on several UNIX based systems. Its current version runs under LINUX and X-windows. When used with the file stedi.xdf it has an interface that is rather similar to the original Atari interface which was considered to be very ergonomical.

The editor is rather complete with a control language, regular expressions in search and replace and many more original features that no other editor has. But most of all it has a very elegant implementation of the folding feature (folds were originally introduced in the occam compiler package for the transputer, but in a way that it couldn't be used for any other language). The editor is very fast and very compact. All sources in the FORM distribution that were made by J. Vermaseren were made with it and use the folding feature extensively. It keeps the files very well ordered.

The editor needs the termcap system for its interaction with the screen. The regular termcap file that comes with the LINUX system contains a serious omission for the xterm entry (the delete key isn't defined). Hence we provide a better file.

stedi The executable of the stedi editor for running inside a terminal window. The 32-bits version.
stedi64 The executable of the stedi editor for running inside a terminal window. The 64-bits version for the opteron.
st A frontend file to allow running inside windows with a definition of special keys.
termcap A repaired termcap file.
stedi.xdf A file with the definition of special keys for the use in X-windows.
stedi.hlp The help file for running under X-windows.
stedi2.hlp The help file for running inside a terminal window (rather obsolete but when everything else fails....).
macs.tar.gz A number of handy macro's that can be executed by stedi.
stedi.tar.gz The sources, including the LaTeX sources for the manual.
stediman.ps The ps version of the manual.
stediman.pdf The pdf version of the manual.
online manual The online version of the manual.

Installation: To install the editor one needs to do a few things. We describe them here for the cshell or the tcshell (for bash things are slightly different. Maybe someone can send me the procedure for bash):

  1. Go to your home directory. Check whether there is a directory named bin. If not, create this directory with the command 'mkdir bin'.
  2. Place the files stedi, st, termcap, stedi.xdf, cedit.hlp in your bin directory. Make sure that the files stedi and st are executable. This is done inside the bin directory with the command 'chmod +x st stedi'. If you are using a computer with an opteron, download the file stedi64 and rename it into stedi with the command 'mv stedi64 stedi'.
  3. In your home directory, edit the file .cshrc with you previously favorite editor. Add the lines:
    setenv TERMCAP ~/bin/termcap
    setenv STEDIHLP ~/bin
    setenv STEDIDFT ~/bin
  4. Make sure that the bin directory is in your path. If this is not the case yet, this is done by adding the line 'set path = ( . ~/bin $path )' to your .cshrc file.
  5. I have also a subdirectory in the bin directory which is called macs for the macro's of stedi. If you want these too, download the file macs.tar.gz, put it inside the bin directory, go to this directory and type the command 'tar -xzf macs.tar.gz'. Add the line 'setenv STEDIMAC ~/bin/macs' to the .cshrc file. Some of the macro's may need editing, because they contain absolute path names.
  6. Finally go to your home directory and type 'source .cshrc'.
After the above has been done you can invoke the editor with the command 'st filename(s)' to edit the file indicated by filename(s). You can edit up to 8 files at the same time. To consult the help file, press the F12 key.