DOS-like text editors

[Liam Proven]

For years now, I've been looking for a command-line, text console-mode
text editor for Linux that looked and worked something like MS-DOS
Edit or any other CUA program.

CUA stands for Common User Access, the menu & control system used by
Windows, MacOS, OS/2, GNOME, KDE etc. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

I normally use vi but I don't like it much; I've always found emacs
totally impenetrable. I've also tried obvious ones like joe and pico.

There are lots of console-mode editors in Ubuntu's repositories: I've
tried e3, jed, jered, ne, lpe, mined and others. I installed fpe but
it won't run.

But doing some digging and Googling and hunting around, I've found two
pretty decent CUA menu-driven editors: ww and setedit.

http://www.geocities.com/h2428/ww/

&

http://setedit.sourceforge.net/

WW is pretty basic, although it seems stable enough from a quick look.
It's quite DOS-like, with nice drop-down menus from the Alt key and so
on, but tends to use the status line for user interaction instead of
text-mode dialog boxes.

However, SETEdit seems like the business. It's perhaps a tiny bit
overcomplicated, but it does pretty much everything you could ask,
from multifile editing and syntax highlighting and so on to a simple,
easy-to-use menu-driven interface.

Debian 3.1 packages are available. They have a bunch of dependencies
but I managed to install them with dpkg and then use

apt-get install -f

... to fix the missing libraries.

I think this program might be a big help to people coming across from
Windows and struggling with vi or other rather more rudimentary
editors.

I'd be interested to know what others think. I reckon it should
perhaps be a candidate for inclusion in "universe" at the very least -
myself, I'd like to see it in the default install instead of nano!

-- 
Liam Proven · Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk · GMail/Google Talk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com · MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk · Skype: liamproven · ICQ: 73187508