Enhanced Editor
The Enhanced Editor, also known as EPM or "Enhanced E" is a fully programmable all-purpose editor that comes with every OS/2 and eComStation installation. It is a bit unusual in the PC world in that it is not a plain text editor application per se, but rather a text editing engine to which you add scripts to make it behave like you want, note that this is different from programmable text editors such as Emacs or even the closely related Visual SlickEdit in that normal extensible editors have a core functionality that can be added to but cannot be stripped away or modified except by changing the executable itself. In EPM almost all of what would be the "core functionality" is actually scripts that can be modified or stripped away as needed.
This means that in practice with relatively little work you can configure and extend the editor to suit you and the tools you use, it is for instance popular to use it as a "workframe" or IDE front end for compilers and related tool chains, but it has also been used as the back end for editing structured publications such as language dictionaries and so on.
- History & background
EPM traces its history to the Personal Editor released in 1982, but that product offered limited programmability via the use of GML configuration files, as that product had a number of problems a re-written version was released in 1984 called simply E and a year later a version of E was released that used REXX as a scripting language.
Known Enhanced Editor scripts and add-ons
Publications
- Tutorials
Language Support
- UK English
- US English
- German (de_de)
- French
- Russian
- Spanish
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Dutch
- Danish
- Swedish
and more
- Older 1.x releases also contained support for
- Icelandic
Links
License and availability
- Commercial software, development stopped but is shipped with all versions of eComStation and all versions of OS/2 2.0 and later.