Page 134 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Multimedia Systems

notes History of Text Editors starts from early 70′s era. With very basic functionality, those editors
did not have many features to format your text. Time has really changed now. Editors like
XEmacs and Notepad++ are one of the favourite text editors due to their exhaustive features,
customizations and support for extensibility.
Below are the list of 9 oldest Text Editors (sans Emacs and Notepad) and brief history about
them.
ed

Ed is one of the oldest and standard Text editors of UNIX operating system. Ed is the first
Text Editor to have implementation of regular expressions. Without any visual feedback, its
error messages were in the form of a question mark (“?”). With coming of so many advance
editors, nobody uses Ed these days but sometimes it is very useful when there is no support
available for any other Text Editors or you are writing some simple shell script.
Joe

JOE is an acronym for Joe’s Own Editor. It is a terminal based text editor for UNIX. It was the
first text editor which incorporated built-in help system which had a reminder on the screen
of how to use it. In many Linux distributions of that era, JOE was the default editor which is
the reason why it was so popular then. The editor is still available with advanced features.
You can download it from its source forge project page.

slickedit
SlickEdit was the first advanced editor that supported features like syntax highlighting,
refactoring code and keyboard shortcuts customizations. It is a cross-browser platform which
is still available with much more advanced features. Latest version of SlickEdit was released
in March 2009.
Crisp editor

CRiSP is yet another cross platform text editor popular among programmers. Early features of
CRiSP also had syntax highlighting, keyboard bindings and code navigation and refactoring
features. CRiSP can also handle huge multi-gigabytes of files. The editor is still very much
available for download with improvements.

epsilon
Epsilon was the popular text editor among programmers. It was a shadow of Emacs with
its default key bindings and layout too. Epsilon is supported on MSDOS, Windows, Linux,
FreeBSD and OS/2 and has support for Unicode too.
veDit

VEDIT is a text editor for MS Windows and MS DOS. It was one of the first Visual Text editor
which could also handle files of huge size. Since it is written in Assembly Language VEDIT is
extremely fast Text editor when compared to other editors. It also supported editing of remote
files via FTP and was able to detect DOS, Unix and Mac files before editing them. VEDIT is
also commercial software.
sam editor

Sam was the first editor that supported multiple files editing. Initially it was designed for
UNIX terminals and was later ported to other systems too. Sam is the favorite text editor of
many distinguished people like Bjarne Stroustrup, Brian Kernigham and Ken Thompson (Ed
editor).

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