Text editor based on interface from Intel ISIS-II aedit, which in turn was based on its big brother alter.

This was originally written in the mid 80s on QNX running on an 8088, with a CBM-64 acting as the console.

I have used this on every UNIX system I have touched. A couple of things have not been implemented,

• other - a feature to hold two files in memory
• error on saving detected, the original ISIS-II would reboot if you attempted to write to a read-only disk, so this part just never happened in the C version - sin of omission.

It has even run on UNIX Release 7 on a PDP-II emulator.

• Written in ANSI C
• Highly portable
• No curses or other libraries required
• Single source file
• Block highlighting.
• Clipboard.
• Window resizing.
• Uses temporary file to deal with large files.
• Works over SSH, including on Windows

Back in the day, aedit was an ISIS-II 8080 port of the 8086 alter text editor, that in turn ran on the Intellec MDS 8086 co-processor.

PC-DOS 1.1 only came with edlin. I wrote an 8086 assembler version of aedit for PC-DOS, it was written using edlin and masm.

I later wrote a CP/M version, in Z80 assembler to run on a 380Z.

This version here is a very portable C implementation, originally written on QNX running on an 8088.

This is not intended to be a configure/make/make install type of project. The output of the build process is a package that can be installed.

On *bsd, haiku, linux, osx, qnx or solaris make can be used. The output should be a package if supported by the platform. The osx build process should build both an arm and x86_64 suitable package. The dos build requires Open Watcom C/C++.

On alpine, archlinux, gentoo or solus then the host build system should be used.

On Windows the PowerShell script should be used. This will enumerate through the architectures setting up the build environment and creating

• signed EXE executable
• signed MSI package
• signed MSIX package
• signed MSIX bundle
• zip containing the EXE for each architecture

Visual Studio Community edition is required.

Main usage is

$ aedit filename.txt

The editor uses modes while showing the menu of options directly on screen.

While the main menu is showing you can use the cursor keys to navigate the file.

The end key will exit the current mode or menu apart from the top-level menu.

Prebuilt binaries can be found either on the releases page on github or as a file on sourceforge. If you have an obsolete/legacy system there may still be a suitable existing package.