VSEdit

A Very Simple Editor


The purpose, as the name implies, is to provide a very simple editor. If you associate this editor with text files, it will provide most of what you need in a simple editor, with very little to learn or remember.

It does have one unusual feature, by default it will save your changes without asking. You can tell if leaving will save the document by looking at the header, it says Viewing when the file is unchanged, and Editing when it is changed. There is an Undo All Changes feature under the Edit menu to avoid saving unwanted changes, and the feature can be turned off by checking Ask Before Saving under the Config menu.

Several simple editors, such as the very nice WordPad from Microsoft, have lost site of their Ascii roots, and no longer recognize a FormFeed character. That is an essential part of many report writers, and a nuisance for someone who likes simple editing for simple tasks. Press control with enter, to put a FormFeed into your text. It needs to be at the beginning of a line to be properly honored. It looks like a box in many screen fonts, but will force text to a new page when printing.

The print function only supports one font size for a document, and the input Screen Font does not have to be the same as the Printer Font, both of which can be changed from the Config menu. This may seem an burden to the purist, but it is a blessing to those of us wanting to read what we are typing and still take a reasonable amount of paper space when printing.

To deal with documents under source code control, this editor recognizes when a file is read only, and makes itself a Viewer.