FTE

• Introduction
• Features
• Folding
• Support of ctags

Introduction

FTE Text Editor (KFTE -- KDE version) --  first written by Marco Macek, who was at the time a Slovenian computer-science student. He worked on this powerful and configurable editor for up to 1996 and then abandoned this project. It was practically dead project from 1998 until Nov 2000, but then resurrected on SourceForge and was active for a year. Then it died again.

Macro Masek later developed a windows manager called IceWM. See Yet Another Window Manager Issue 21. Icewm is in large part inspired by the OS/2 Workplace Shell interface. IceWM, written by Marco Macek and enhanced by Mathias Hasselmann, is a small, lightweight window manager that is nonetheless feature-rich. It supports multiple desktops or workspaces, can be used without a mouse, supports (and comes with several) themes and does a nice job of mimicking the style of that other OS.

IceWM is a stacking window manager for the X Window System graphical infrastructure, written by Marko Maček. It was coded from scratch in C++ and is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.[1] It is relatively lightweight in terms of memory and CPU usage, and comes with themes that allow it to imitate the GUI of Windows 95, OS/2, Motif, and other graphical user interfaces.[1] IceWM is meant to excel in look and feel while being lightweight and customizable.

IceWM can be configured from plain text files[1] stored in a user's home directory, making it easy to customize and copy settings. IceWM has an optional, built-in taskbar with menu, tasks display, network and CPU meters, mail check and configurable clock. Official support for GNOME and KDE menus was previously available as a separate package. In recent IceWM versions, support for them is embedded. External graphical programs for editing configuration[1] and menu exist.

The Easy mode default desktop of the Asus Eee PC uses IceWM.[2]

Features

• Syntax highlighting and syntax-aware autoindent for many languages / file formats, including C(++), Java, Perl, Sh, Pascal, SQL, Assembly, PHP, Python, REXX, Ada, Fortran, IDL, LinuxDoc, TeX, TeXInfo, HTML, diffs, emails and makefiles
• User-definable syntax highlighting using a configurable state machine
• Parenthesis matching
• Parsing of compiler output (jump to file/line of error, jump to prev/next error)
• Parsing of "grep" output (jump to file/line of match)
• Simple handling of several open files / directory views
• Several variations of the "copy'n'paste" mechanism (including "Copy-Append", "Paste column", "Paste line"
• Many Line transformation operations (split, join, center, toupper, tolower, togglecase, rot13, delete-to-end, ...)
• An ASCII table ("insert this funny char")
• Many block selection operations (mark stream/rectangle/line(s), insert stream/rectangle/line(s) from file, write selection to file, print selection)
• Operations on selections (toupper, tolower, rot13, user defined translates, indent entire block, sort, ...)
• Several navigation operations (search string, bookmark stack, goto line, goto matching parenthesis, go to next/prev similar word, ...)
• Search and replace optionally using regular expressions
• Folds, including "create by regexp", "create by routines", nested folds
• Interfacing to compiler/make, grep, shell, ispell
• Routine/Function list for several languages
• ... Many more

FTE is a programmers' text editor with a few tricks up its sleeve that you won't find in most editors. The main thing that distinguishes FTE is right in its name: it folds. If that does not mean anything to you, keep reading and we'll give you some examples and illustrations. Other handy features FTE gives you are: state-machine based syntax highlighting; custom modes for many languages (including HTML, Perl, Java, etc); configurable key-bindings (with nice CUA-style defaults); a number of subtle programming aids; and pretty much all the miscellaneous features a programmer expects to have handy in an editor.

Who is FTE for, exactly? For me, the biggest "selling point" for FTE was that it runs on the three platforms I use most, and can share a configuration between them. But I am fairly uncommon in using OS/2 most of the time; it is a lot easier to find a cross-platform editor if you use only Win32 and Linux (and if you use MacOS, BeOS, or other platforms, you have some porting work if you want to run FTE). But even for two-platform compatibility, FTE occupies a middle ground without much else directly comparable. FTE does  a lot more than most shareware/freeware editors, even compared to those that target programmers. On the other hand, FTE neither gives you all the power, nor requires all the effort and commitment of emacs or vi. Most specifically, although it is quite configurable, FTE does not have any builtin scripting language the way emacs--or some high-end commercial editors--have.

On the negative side, although FTE has less arcana to it than vi or emacs, it still has more than I think it should. To configure FTE, you have to mess around with text-based configuration files, rather than use friendly configuration screens like you would find in most commercial programmers' editors. Also, like much free software the documentation tends too much towards "accurate, but not friendly."

Folding

If you haven't used an editor that does folding, you really just do not yet understand how useful it is. The idea behind folding is that the text you are editing is often composed of conceptual blocks that you want to be reminded of, but don't necessarily want to have to scroll through. For example, you might want to see all the methods of a class on screen at once, but not necessarily the whole implementation of each method (and if you did show the implementation, it wouldn't all fit on one screen). But even more than programming code, one thing that benefits hugely  from folding is HTML. Here is an example, based on the FTE documentation:

<H2>SaveFolds</H2>  (0:10)
<H2>Colorizer</H2>  [0]
    Specifies a previously declared <A
    HREF="#colorizer">colorize</A> mode to use for syntax
    highlighting in this editing mode.
<H2>Loading files in various formats</H2>  (0:43)

The first and last line here are color-highlighted within FTE itself. The parenthesis (also color-highlighted to stand out) after the folded lines tell you quickly that, e.g., the "SaveFolds" section has 10 lines in it, and is a top-level fold (it might contain sub-folds). It takes just a couple keystrokes to fold away "Colorizer" and display the "SaveFolds" body.

If you happen to need to look at the same file in a different text editor, the folds are indicated by comments appropriate to the language being used, for example:

<H2>Loading files in various formats</H2> <!--fold00-->
It adds a few extra characters, but doesn't interfere with the actual 
function of the file outside of FTE. 

Support of ctags

See http://home.hiwaay.net/~darren/ctags/. This is a way 
of creating automated hypertext links between, for example, function calls and 
function definitions (even across files). 

Other nice features

There are some nuggets buried in FTE that you might not even notice at first. 
The modes are pretty obvious. Most of them just set up syntax highlighting and 
indentation; but a few (like HTML) add some extra menus to insert templates (the 
HTML mode has most tags in the menu). You can also make your own modes with a 
little bit of work (for a Python mode, download 
http://www.vex.net/parnassus/apyllo.py?i=55744778 ). 
In no particular order, here are some more subtle nuggets: 


	
Highlights matching parenthesis when cursor is on a parenthesis (same with 
the various brackets and braces). Really handy to help see how nested 
expressions line up. 
	
Hypertext list of "routines". This is part of language definitions. The idea 
is that you can open another screen that just shows a summary of the meaningful 
units of your text (function definitions, HTML headings, class declarations, 
etc). Highlight one unit and press enter to jump there. The concept is similar 
to folds, but operates independently of what's folded. 
	
Bookmarks. Lots of editors have this nowadays. FTE is not left out on 
this. They are named in FTE, rather than simply numbered. 
	
Highlight all occurances of a word. Handy, for example, to quickly see 
everywhere a call to function FooBar() is made in a file. 


Lots of stuff you might expect: block indenting, entab/detab, case 
changes on text block, sort lines, column marking/copying, call to external 
programs (such as compiling), regex searching, screen splitting. A lot of this 
stuff is expected in a good editor, and nothing obvious is missing from FTE. 

Conclusions

FTE does a nice job at a good number of things, and is especially a good 
choice for users who want a consistent editor across platforms. A few rough 
edges make FTE more work to configure than it should be, but the learning curve 
on FTE is still comparatively mild. You can get a lot of power and 
convenience--free of cost, and in an open-source spirit--by selecting FTE as 
your text editor. 



   

      

      
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NEWS CONTENTS

20091216 :  there is a precompiled ubuntu package for FTE   ( Dec 16, 2009 ) 
20091216 : Release 0.46b5 -- the last version  by Marko Macek  (  ) 

Old News ;-) 



[Dec 16, 2009] there is a precompiled ubuntu package for FTE




FTE- A Folding Editor From the OS-2 World. 



	
FTE is a multi-platform 
editor, available for Linux, OS/2, DOS, and Windows; support
	Exuberant 
ctags. See a
	short review of an earlier version in issue 7 of LG.

	
Marco Macek, a Slovenian computer-science student, had been developing 
this powerful and configurable editor for up to 1996 and then abandoned 
this project.

	
Main features:

	


		
Multilevel Undo/redo

		
Real best Dos-style textmode edit tradition with multilevel menus.

		
Multiple windows/multiple files editing.

		
Support linking of windows (the ability to edit file in several 
	windows).

		
3 types of blocks (flexible operations on blocks and the ability 
	to select block until certain delimiters).

		
Cut and past in best DOS traditions (including a very rare in Unix 
	world ability to select block with Shift-arrow operation !)

		
No ability to process buffer with external commands (not yet)
	

	
There is also GUI-based implementation -- 
	KFTE --  a KDE port of FTE text editor. This version aims only 
at providing a KDE GUI, and the core of the editor is unchanged. 

	


		

		Ftp sites for download
	

	
Latest source snapshot

	


		

		fte-0.49.13.src.tar.gz
	

	


		

		FTEN4913.ZIP -- win32 binaries 
		

		
OS/2 binaries are available
		here.
	




Release 0.46b5 -- the last version by Marko Macek

	

	
	ftes46b5.zip - Source code 
	

	
	ftel46b5.tgz - Linux binaries 
	

	
	fteo46b5.zip - OS/2 binaries 
	

	
	ften46b5.zip - Win32 binaries 
	

	
	fted46b5.zip - DOS binaries (protected mode, DPMI required)




Recommended Links

PRODUCT REVIEW 
-- Folding Text Editor (FTE) --

eFTE HomePage

FTE Text Editor Get FTE Text 
Editor at SourceForge.net

FTE is a Text Mode text editor for xterm sessions. 
Color syntax highlighting

for C/C++, REXX, HTML, IPF, PERL, Ada, Pascal, TEX. Multiple file/window

editing, Column blocks, configurable menus and keyboard bindings, mouse

support, undo/redo, regular expression search and replace, folding,

background compiler execution. 

	
20020324 
	
This is the snapshot after some very major changes. You need to compile 
	this yourself. New features include internal CVS support, new colors, and 
	many new commands. 

	


		

		
		fte-20020324-common.zip

		Common package, necessary with all other archives. 
		

		

		
		fte-20020324-src.zip

		Source distribution. 
	
	




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and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman 
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The Last but not Least  Technology is dominated by 
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. 
Ph.D



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