Preditor

GUI based programmers editor with some strong IDE capabilities developed by US based company Compuware, and in addition to being sold separately was part of their Xpediter product line which is a debugging and code revision toolkit for COBOL, Assembler and PL/I code that targeted OS/2 as well as IBM mini and mainframe operating systems. That product line is still being sold but now only supports IBM mainframes.

According to the developer, the Preditor/2 editor was based on the earlier Sage Professional Editor. Similar to that product and the Enhanced Editor from IBM featured an editing core that handled only basic editing and interface tasks while most of the functionality was built using a supplied macro language. Unlike SPE which used a C like macro language, Preditor/2 used an AWK derived language called Professional Extension Language (PEL). Since this is a semi-compiled language it slowed boot times down since the program compiled the current scripts at startup. With version 2 this was fixed by using a tokenising system where scripts that had not changed are pre-compiled and re-used at each startup, speeding the startup time considerably.

At the same time the use of PEL gives the package a flexibility only rivalled by EPM and in some cases exceeds the latter. User interface and file search capabilities are actually more advanced that on EPM. The system features a number of "modes" that emulate the look and feel of a number of other editors. These modes are entirely written in PEL scripts and so is the bulk of the "standard" user interface. The modes and the UI can therefore be changed to suit your personal preferences. In fact someone described the Preditor/2 as "more of an AWK GUI based development system than an editor". The AWK based language is also better suited to some text processing functions than the combination of REXX and E scripts on EPM. However the support for processing international text is severely limited.

Features
Preditor/2 supports both multiple windows and single window UI styles allowing you to emulate both MDI and legacy multiple files in a window style user interfaces if that is what you want: It has a number of IDE style functions that can control and interface with compilers and other development systems in addition to error parsing and these can be extended via the built-in PEL language. It also has multiple file search capabilities with a separate search and result pane and options for advanced search and replace, supports tagging and specifically supports ctags, and as it is fully multi threaded you can edit, perform complex file searches and compile simultaneously.

It also has some separate formatting functions that give it better printing control and some rudimentary word processing features and from version 2.1 and up supports hex editing.

Syntax highlighting & templates
Note that user programmable syntax highlighting is only available with version 2.1 and later, user creation of language templates however is available in all versions of the package. As shipped Preditor/2 came with syntax colour highlighting and template support for AWK, C, C++, COBOL, Pascal, PEL (their own macro language), REXX and Resource Scripts (.rc files).

Macro support

 * Built in macro language called Professional Extension Language (PEL), this is based on AWK.

Keyboard mappings and modes

 * Built in: Brief, EPM, Emacs, ISPF, vi and more.
 * You can add your own.

Versions

 * 1.0 (1994)
 * 2.1 (May 1995) - Added programmable syntax highlighting, hexadecimal editing, significant startup speed improvements and enhanced search capabilities.
 * 3.0 (1996) - Adds project management functionality and the first version that has a Microsoft Windows 32 executable as well as an OS/2 one.
 * 3.02 (1997)

Authors

 * Murray Wilson (Compuware)

Links

 * Carsten Whimster: A Programmer's Editor Shootout: Preditor 3.0
 * Original announcement, mini-review & news snippet from Infoworld magazine
 * Third party scripts
 * Groups for Preditor/2 - Project management capabilities for P/2 2.1 and later.