MED v1.22 - by Chris Wenham

ED is a beautifully designed programmer's editor with a broad base of features, power and flexibility. Formerly called "Mr. Ed", MED is aimed primarily at programmers, but may find a home on the machines of non-programmers thanks to the sheer number of conveniences it offers.

For the Programmer...

MED's first appeal is the syntax highlighting support for almost every programming language on the planet, and even some non-program files like the CONFIG.SYS. It does C, it does Java, it does Rexx, it does Pascal, it does Fortran, it does Assembly, it does HTML, it does TeX and it even does Prolog. No matter what language you program in, chances are you'll find MED has a syntax-highlighting profile already made for it. What's even better is the fact that you can extend the support yourself for languages that MED's author didn't already cover.

Second of importance is compiler support, and here again MED comes pre-configured to work with several popular compilers such as Watcom, GNU C, Visual Age and Java. Adding your own is a cinch, as long as you know what the command-line switches for the compiler are. MED can trap the output of the compiler and look for error messages, moving the cursor up to the particular line in the program that the compiler was having problems with. Buttons on the tool bar let you step up and down through the errors that the compiler reported.

MED even comes with DDE support that can be configured as you please, with commands to load a file, go to a particular line and display error messages. In fact, it uses this to talk to itself; if you associate a file type with MED and double-click on such a file while MED is already running, the second copy of MED that OS/2 tries to launch will see that it's already running and will tell that first copy, via DDE, to open the file instead. The second session of MED will then close, leaving the file you wanted open and ready in the first copy of MED. This convenience leads to certain practices, such as starting a copy of MED at the beginning of the day, tucking it away on a virtual desktop somewhere (I use the Virtual Desktops in Object Desktop's Control Center), then opening a project folder and double-clicking on all the files I want loaded.

And of course, like all programmer's editors, MED comes with the usual outrageously huge stock of configuration options (GIF, 11K). Almost every aspect of MED's behavior can be changed, right down to what shape of cursor to use or mouse button to select text with. If you have niggling preferences, chances are MED can accommodate.

For everyone...

Despite being mainly geared towards programmers, the average user might find some value in it as well. There is the excellent syntax highlighting for the CONFIG.SYS and HTML files, and there's also its highly convenient Window Monitor:

The Window Monitor (GIF, 27K) is a thin bar that runs along either side of MED's main window. It lists all of the files that are currently open, with markers that indicate which ones haven't had their changes saved yet. Double click on any filename and you jump to that file. Its convenience is immeasurable when you've got a large (or even small) bunch of files that need to be edited together, such as a web site.

What's more, MED will remember all the files you had open when you close the program, and reopen them all when you next start it again. It even ends on the last file you were editing at the time and the last cursor position too. Definitely handy when you need to suspend your work for the night and resume where you left off the next day.

Small Problems

But MED isn't without a few annoyances. Chief among these was its slightly duller-than-usual keyboard responsiveness. MED tends to forget keystrokes whenever there's heavy disk activity going on, sometimes even during moderate disk activity. There were times when I was typing, the hard disk would light up for a moment as OS/2 flushed its cache or another program did a bit of housecleaning, and I found that MED had dropped several of the keystrokes I'd entered.

Secondly is its word-wrapping. MED will word-wrap as you type by inserting physical carriage-returns into the text on the fly, rather than using the visual-only, "Paragraph" word-wrapping found in the OS/2 System Editor (e.exe). If you begin typing in the middle of a file, MED will try to word-wrap all the text following the cursor, often messing up the formatting of your text by removing carriage returns that were supposed to be there. While this method of word-wrapping might be best for some forms of editing, it isn't for mine, and I'd like the ability to switch between that and the style of the OS/2 System Editor.

But is it for you?

Although I primarily program in Rexx, with some occasional Javascript work, Java and HTML, MED is suited well for other languages such as the traditional C and C++. But MED could do anyone a useful service, as it's packed with convenient features that look good in any editor.

MED v1.22

by Matthias Pfersdorff
download from the MED Home page (ZIP, 702K)
Registration: US$25

Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

Copyright © 1998 - Falcon Networking

ISSN 1203-5696