Easy-Edit (ee)

Click image for a larger view of an easy-edit screen (13K gif)

The ee Mini-FAQ

What is easy-edit?
What are some of its features?
What is required to install it?
What does an editing screen look like? What do the help windows look like?
What documentation is included?
Where did it come from?
What is the licensing situation? Warranty?
How may easy-edit be obtained?

Easy-Edit News (updated 11/16/95)

What ee is

A user-friendly editor for Unix novices, originally developed for use as a default mail editor in Elm.
A split-screen editor that displays commands in the bottom window while editing happens in the top. A novice user should never become stuck in ee without knowing now to exit, as can happen with vi or emacs.
A mode of GNU Emacs. If your system is running GNU Emacs, it can run easy-edit. But once in ee, normal emacs functions and key mappings are blocked.

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Easy-Edit features

Splits the screen into an editing window and a scrollable help Window.
Auto line wrap by default. Paragraph/document line-fill reformatting.
Contains cut/paste, "undo", search/replace, file importing, and many other common editing functions.
Help window replace by an advanced version, replace by a searchable user's manual, or eliminated entirely. Relative window sizes between the editing and help window can be changed.
Does Emacs auto backups and recovery; alerts user to presence of recovery files.

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Documentation

Built-in documentation includes the regular help window, an advanced help window (more concise), and a user's manual. These are stored as printable text files in the easy-edit lib directory (usually /usr/local/lib/easyedit).
A man page is included in the distribution.

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Requirements

GNU Emacs: Easy-edit requires GNU Emacs. It is actually a special mode of GNU Emacs, written in emacs-lisp. If your site does not have Emacs, it is probably not worth installing the huge Emacs package just for the sake of getting ee. Check out one of the self-contained editors such as "Pico" instead.
However, if your site already has GNU Emacs installed, installing Easy-Edit is faster and easier than installing a package that must be compiled, and will probably involve less overhead (for example, on a Solaris system that already has GNU Emacs, an ee installation uses less than half the disk space of Pico.)
Unix Bourne Shell: The easy-edit command itself is a Bourne shell (usually /bin/sh) script that processes arguments and invokes emacs in easy-edit mode. For non-Unix systems running GNU Emacs, it may be possible to use the original easyedit.el file and create a new invocation script of a particular system. The author has not tested this himself.
Disk Requirements: A normal easy-edit Installations requires about 87 Kbytes (not including storage of original source). This can be reduced by up to 33 Kbytes by eliminating the redundant .el file after it is byte-compiled into a .elc file by emacs.
Personal Installation: If you aren't the system administrator and your system adm will not install easy-edit (the cad!), you can install it under your own signon, as long as your system is running GNU Emacs. Some suggestions on how to do this are included in the Makefile.