The Hessling Editor


The Hessling Editor is an open source text editor first released in August 1992. For more than ten years it has been written and maintained by Mark Hessling, who along with being the original author of THE is also a maintainer of Regina, an open source REXX interpreter that has been ported to most Unix platforms.
According to its developers, THE is a text editor modeled on the VM/CMS editor XEDIT, adding the "best features of Mansfield Software's Kedit."

Features

Folding is controlled by the "all" command. It permits one to display and work on only those lines in a file that contain a given pattern. For example, the command: all /string/ will display only the lines that include "string"; any global changes one makes on this slice will be reflected in the file. In order to restore visibility of all lines one needs to enter: all.
Similar to XEDIT, THE uses IBMs REXX as its macro language, which makes THE highly configurable and versatile. This provides the ability to create powerful extensions to the editor and/or customize it to specialized needs. For example, one can create edit commands that would allows one to manipulate columns of text. With REXX, one can also integrate OS commands or external functions into an edit session. Since version 3.0, THE also has user-configurable syntax highlighting.
While THE and XEDIT are not GUI editors, THE has its own syntax highlighting language definition .tld file format comparable with KEDIT's .kld format.
THE is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is available for many operating systems: most or all POSIX Unix platforms ; QNX, OS/2, DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP.