QEdit

History

Shareware programmers editor originally introduced for DOS in 1985 that later became known as The SemWare Editor Jr.. It is an in-memory editor originally developed in Turbo Pascal that had some notable feature in its time such as a simple Pascal like macro language and the ability to run in just 50k of memory (later C based versions needed 90k) which resulted in the company later offering a memory resident (TSR) version of the package.

With version 1.5 QEdit was re-written in C and ported to OS/2 1.x, but apart from the ability to handle larger files it did not offer anything over and above the the DOS version except for a higher retail price, this version was later used as the basis for version 2 of the DOS version which also added a TSR capable edition. While QEdit was a well liked product it could never truly be a programmers editor in the modern sense since it did not parse text, rendering features such as syntax highlighting for instance impossible to achieve, this lead the company to re-write the product from scratch and in 1991 it offered a new version to beta testers called QEdit Pro that had parsing features and a much improved macro language, however that product had a difficult birth and did not see a release until 1993 as The SemWare Editor and then only in a DOS version with no OS/2 version being made available as had initially been suggested.

In 1994 the company started offering version 3 of the original QEdit in a 32 bit version for OS/2 2.0 or higher and now offered some integration features such as support for long filenames but most of the OS/2 support did not arrive until a year later with version 4 but by that time is supported the OS/2 clipboard and so on. In 1997 the company renamed QEdit The SemWare Editor Jr. and in a similar timeframe stated to offer a Windows 32 bit console dition of the Semware Editor. The company continued to sell the OS/2 version of the "TSE Jr." up until 2002 and still offer a DOS version of the but they have been unchanged for a more than a couple of decades with the exception of name changes and even the Windows versions have not seen any development in more than a decade.

Version

• Last known DOS, memory resident for DOS, and OS/2 version: The Semware Editor Jr. v4.00e (1997-02-21 but unchanged since 1995)
• Last known DOS Pro version: Semware Editor Pro v2.50 (1997-02-21)
• Last known Windows version: Semware Editor Pro v4.4 (2005-01-07)

Prerequisites

• OS/2 2.0 or later for the v3 or v4 of QEdit/TSE Jr. for OS/2
• DOS 2.0 and 128k or more for the DOS version of QEdit/TSE Jr.

Links & publications

• Semware Coproration homepage

Reviews

• Andrew Pitonyak: A Programmer's Editor Shootout: The SemWare Editor

License & availability

• QEdit aka The SemWare Editor Jr. is closed source shareware, the DOS version is still available but the OS/2 and TSR versions are no longer offered.
• The SemWare Editor is commercial software, you can still purchase it for both DOS and 32 bit versions of Windows.

Publisher

• SemWare Corporation