QEdit

QEdit is a shareware programmers editor originally introduced for DOS in 1985 by SemWare Corporation.

That later became known as The SemWare Editor Junior. 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.

History

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 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 edition of the Semware Editor.

Reviews

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

Releases

QEdit

• 1.0 (1985)
• 2.1 (Feb 1990)

QEdit Advanced

• 2.15 (1991)
• 3.00 (Jan 1994)

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.