UsenEdit is a simple editor that lets you manipulate text files in any single font face and in the most common point sizes. It was designed to cooperate with Peter Speck's excellent UseNet reader "Nuntius," as well as to give me a mono-spaced editor that takes less memory to run than even TeachText!
UsenEdit's preferences dialog contains the following items: popup menus for the font and size, input fields for the tab size and document width, radio buttons for text wrapping, and a checkbox for opening a new window upon launch. If the checkbox is checked, UsenEdit will open an empty, untitled document when you launch it (unless you are opening a file from the Finder or Nuntius, in which case UsenEdit ignores this setting.) The document width will only be accurate for mono-spaced fonts like Courier and Monaco, but UsenEdit will always create a window width of at LEAST the number of characters you specify for proportional fonts. UsenEdit will let you choose to wrap the text to the width it creates, or to the size of the window itself if you don't like having to scroll sideways.
Additionally, you can choose the maximum number of windows that UsenEdit is allowed to open. Unless you really need more than three, it is recommended that you do not change this option. If you do, and get "System Error #25" or UsenEdit complains of running out of memory, you will need to increase the amount of memory allocated to UsenEdit in the Finder.
Undo is supported for most text operations, and accepts plain text pasted from the clipboard. UsenEdit will also support System 7's stationery pad documents, for those of you who like to keep multiple .sig's on hand, yet don't want to trash them inadvertently!
Printing is supported, but only in Courier 10-point with 58 lines per page. More options will be added in later versions, but as it requires some extensive rewriting of the code, I skipped it for this version.
UsenEdit requires at least 50k of free memory and System 7.0 or later to run. You can open several windows at once, and each document can be as large as 32k (subject to memory available). UsenEdit accomplishes this by using the system's temporary memory if it does not have enough of its own to open a file.
UsenEdit was written on a Macintosh IIsi in THINK Pascal 4.0.2, running under System 7.1. It was written to fill a specific need of mine, and as a result is fairly featureless. UsenEdit does not support styles, multiple fonts, etc., but it DOES do wordwrap, 32k files, multiple files open at once, Apple Events, and stationery. It is intended to run in as small a partition as possible, provided that you have temporary memory available for opening large documents. (You can always increase the default memory allocated to UsenEdit if you so desire.) and as a result will stay pretty small. If you want a bigger and better editor, go to BBEdit or the others in its class. Of course, I ALWAYS welcome suggestions on making my programs better!
Many thanks go to Peter Lewis for his TextEdit and scroll bar code, and to Laurent Daudelin for his scroll-bar clikloop/asm stuff. Without their help, UsenEdit would still be at the 1.0d8 stage! Thanks also to my roommate for putting up with late night typing, swearing (at Apple usually; at myself occasionally!), and those nasty carrier detect noises when I give in and fire up MacSLIP and Nuntius to check comp.sys.mac.programmers.
You may use UsenEdit as often as you like without a fee, but I would appreciate it if you would send me a postcard or e-mail to let me know who you are, where you are, and what you do with UsenEdit! I'd like to see how far this gets, not to mention bug notifications and those really cool ideas you come up with while reading news at 2:00 am! -- If you come across any bugs, typos, etc., PLEASE LET ME KNOW!
UsenEdit may be distributed whenever and wherever you see fit, provided it is unmodified and is accompanied by all the README files associated with it. NO money may be charged for the use of UsenEdit, except for online and disk-copying charges, or various User Group dues. It may be placed on the various CD-ROM collections such as Sumex-Aim, BMUG, and the like.
I'm a 19-yr-old sophomore at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and am majoring in Computer Science. I program mostly in Pascal, and occasionally fiddle with C and the Unix environment.
