SWediT is a text editor written in Java using SWT. See question 2 for more info on SWT. SWediT is pronounced as one word, basically the word "edit" with a "swe" sound in front of it. If you say it to a random person, they will think you said "sweat it." The capitalization is to note the reliance on SWT, not to change the pronunciation to "es -- double-u -- eddy -- tee."
SWT is the Standard Widget Toolkit. It is an alternative to AWT and Swing. SWT is an Eclipse project. The advantage of SWT is that it tends have the functionality of Swing while maintaining the native look and feel of the platform it is running on. There is also a performance advantage over Swing in many cases. The disadvantage, of course, is that it is not part of "standard" Java.
Well, the problem was VEDIT. VEDIT is a commercial text editor. At one time, they had a version that ran on the QNX 4.2x. operating system. This is important because that's what my co-workers and I used for many years. When QNX released 6.x / Neutrino / Momentics, VEDIT abandoned QNX.
I know, I know, there're a million text editors out there. Things are a little more complicated in the QNX 6.x world, though. The choices were pretty much as follows: the stand QNX Photon editor ped (no undo function), the old QNX text-based editor qed (no longer supported), emacs (which we'll talk about later), vi or a clone (also later), workspace (freeware from a QNX user, but we didn't like it that much), and handful of others like JOE (very much like emacs) and mp (couldn't be configured the way we like). That left us with either learning a new editor we didn't like or writing one from scratch. BTW, you may see nedit available for QNX 6.x. It was available for 6.1, but when we started using 6.2 the 6.1 version broke. Also, nedit and all X Windows applications launch very slowly on QNX Photon.
First of all, emacs isn't as customizable as you think. I have seen 3000 line elisp files, such as the excellent cua.el from Kim Storm. My whole text editor is about that size! What's the point of being able to configure if I can rewrite from scratch in less space? Besides, some things can't really be messed with. A simple example; try and map the escape key to quit (which is normally Ctrl-G) and still use the Alt key as Meta.
On top of this, emacs on QNX requires X to be installed, even if you are only running in a terminal. A special program called XPhoton must be running, which fools X programs into thinking that Photon is really X Windows. This process slows emacs down and makes it even bulkier than it normally is.
You have got to be kidding me. Vi was a brilliant innovation in 1976. I'm very glad it was written. The idea of modes (editing mode versus command mode) was a great idea at the time. All modern editors should be modeless. I know that people who know vi really well claim they can be just as fast or faster than someone working in a modeless text editor. This is a bit like Michael Jordan bragging that he can beat me at basketball with one hand tied behind his back. It's not that he's not good with one hand tied, it's that you shouldn't deliberately tie one hand if you are looking for productivity.
On QNX, if you want to use the Eclipse IDE for commercial purposes you pay quite a bit of money. On top of that, Eclipse is big, bulky, and slow. Because all of our systems are custom, we use "embedded" targets as development machines. That means the size of our dev tools matter to us.
Later on, the point became moot, as Eclipse stopped being supported on QNX at all. Eclipse development was cross-compilation only, not self-hosted. Later versions of QNX ditched any kind of self-hosted development, although we had stopped using QNX by then.
SWediT is available from its Project Page at SourceForge.net.
Basically, your command line should look something like
javac –classpath .;c:\jdk1.3.1\bin;c:\jdk1.3.1\lib;swt.jar SWediT.java
On QNX 6.x, this looks something like
j9c –classpath .;/usr/eclipse/ive/bin; /usr/eclipse/ive/lib;swt.jar SWediT.java
If swt.jar is already in your CLASSPATH, you don't have to worry about it. I tend to put it in the
same directory as my source so I can ditch the –classpath option. If you don't have swt.jar (and
the corresponding .dll or .so shared library) you will need to get it from Eclipse.org.
java –cp .;c:\jdk1.3.1\bin;c:\jdk1.3.1\lib;swt.jar SWediT.java
or
j9 –cp .;/usr/eclipse/ive/bin; /usr/eclipse/ive/lib;swt.jar SWediT.java
Now you need not just swt.jar in the classpath but the shared library as well. On Windows, this
file is named something like swt-win32-2047.dll, while on QNX it will be libswt-photon-2047.so.
On Windows, copying the .dll to \Winnt\system32 is usually a good option; on QNX you can put it
with all the other j9 .so files in /usr/eclipse/ive/bin.
Yes. One of the things that has driven us crazy over the years is strange junk characters getting into our source files. We've spent hours trying to figure out why a program won't compile only to later discover a hidden control character at the end of the document. So SWediT discards all characters outside the range of ASCII 32 through 126. This means line art is discarded, control characters are ignored, accented letters are gone, and more. The only exceptions are the '\n' characters that mark a new line (ASCII 13) and the '\t' tab characters (ASCII 9). SWediT is not appropriate if you need these characters.
Well, the program is designed have configurable key mapping, but I haven't actually created a way for users to enter them yet. At some point there will be some real documentation and a method inside the program for examining the key map.
You shouldn't, probably. There is a little more reason to use it if you are on QNX 6.x, but even then you're probably better off with something else. I had fairly unusual requirements. These included the following: (1) configurable, so that I could make my editor look like Notepad and like VEDIT; (2) character-at-a-time, unlimited undo/redo; (3) removal of junk characters; (4) works on QNX and Windows; (5) limited retraining of myself and co-workers; (6) matching open and close parenthesis, square brackets, and curly braces; (7) block-selection mode; (8) multiple buffers; (9) reasonably small installed size; (10) reasonable performance. (11) Syntax highlighting for C, C++, and Java. Things that we did not care about that many editors provide include: (1) file compare; (2) printing; (3) word wrap; (4) integration with other programs, such as e-mail or an IDE; (5) macros; (6) spell check; (7) bookmarks; (8) window tiling.
Please note that I don't really expect anyone to use this text editor. It was written for internal use, and it served it's purpose.
Um, er... Okay, none. But these are some of the questions that might get asked if any one ever stumbles across SWediT.
Mostly TextPad, which I liked a lot. I also used Notepad, believe it or not, because my Windows machine at work does not have anything better. However, at about two weeks of development I started using SWediT almost exclusively for its own development. Later, I switched to Notepad++. I never really have found a text editor I like on Linux. My company stopped using QNX in about 2004, so SWediT wasn't really necessary after that.
The complete text of license can be found here. Basically, I took the MIT license and then went looking through every license I could find and added their requirements to the MIT license. I'm particularly fond of the part about not using SWediT for online control of a nuclear facility. There is a very dry sense of humor going on here, and I certainly understand if you don't get it.
Umm... me?
This, of course, is the reaction every programmer has to looking at any other programmer's code. Don't worry, though; the terms of the license prohibit anyone from using my program for anything dangerous, like aircraft control.
My name is James Ingraham. I work for Sage Automation, Inc. as Software Engineering Team Leader.