A list of reliable text editors.
All data required by References have to be entered or edited with a text editor. As a text editor is not included with this software package, a separate program should be (installed and) used.
On Windows-systems, notepad may be used for the first steps with References, e.g. for edititing of the configuration file. However, users should pay attention to the fact that notepad uses utf-8 encoding for new files by default. The Windows-Version of References requires that text editors use latin-1 (other designations: ISO 8859-1, cp-1252 or ANSI) encoding for editing text.
However, more comfortable alternatives exist for use with References. A recommended text editor with an uncomplicated user interface is TED Notepad . Thie free text editor may be obtained from the author's web page. Following installation, the correct default encoding is selected with the menu options: Options | Settings | Tab File | Select Default Encoding | ANSI.
Another highly recommended Editor for use with References is SciTE, a reliable and stable open source text editor. For use with References it is recommended to change default configuation by selecting "Options/Open User Options File". So it may be useful to change the default font to a monospaced font (for details see the file SciTEFAQ.html. A proposal for changes to be copied into the SciTEUser.properties configuration file (Windows Version of SciTE):
font.base=$(font.monospace)
font.small=$(font.monospace)
font.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.text=$(font.monospace)
font.text.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.embedded.base=$(font.monospace)
font.embedded.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.vbs=$(font.monospace)
font.monospace=font:Courier New,size:12
# Next two lines: size of the SciTE window
position.width=$(scale 700)
position.height=$(scale 740)
# Next line: sets encoding to cp1252/latin-1/ISO 8859-1
code.page=0
With these changes to the configuration file, SciTE is the ideal text editor for use with references. Its installation is described in section 3.2 of the manual (PDF)
On Linux systems, a useful text editor for use with References is nano. Users of systems with GNOME desktop may use gedit. More complex text editors which are probably available for modern Linux systems are vi or emacs (see below).
For use with References, the ideal text
editor is SciTE
It is
recommended to change default configuation by selecting "Options/Open
User Options File". So it may be useful to change the default font to
a monospaced font (for details see the file SciTEFAQ.html.
A proposal
for changes to be copied into the SciTEUser.properties configuration
file (Linux version of SciTE):
Another text editor appropriate for use with
References
on Linux systems is
textadept
.
font.base=$(font.monospace)
font.small=$(font.monospace)
font.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.text=$(font.monospace)
font.text.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.embedded.base=$(font.monospace)
font.embedded.comment=$(font.monospace)
font.vbs=$(font.monospace)
font.monospace=font:DejaVu Sans Mono,size:11
# Next two lines: size of the SciTE window
position.width=$(scale 700)
position.height=$(scale 740)
# Next line: sets encoding to utf-8
code.page=65001
An outstanding text editor is gvim, the graphical Version of Vim, (download page). Use of Vim in its ``classical'' mode of use requires quite an amount of time for learning. However, gvim ist well documented. Gvim easy mode is a simplified mode which works like any ``click and type editor''. It can be launched with the -y command line option, to make gvim available (from the etext.exe shell in v4.1 or later) with this mode, you may enter the line
TEXT_EDITOR=gvim -y
into the configuration file (refs.cfg, it is assumed that the directory with the gvim.exe executable has been entered into the list assigned to the PATH environment variable). To see the documentation of easy mode, press F1, details of easy mode can be found opening ``Help Find...'' menu and enter `easy'. Editing with gvim normal mode, however, is much more efficient.
Another excellent text editor is GNU Emacs, which is available in a Windows version. General Emacs documentation is available online. Here, documentation of the Windows implementation can be found. The Windows implementation is available via the GNU website. On major Linux distributions Emacs should be easily available with the distribution-specific package tools.
Text files have different codings on DOS/Windows (CR/LF) and UNIX/Linux (LF) systems. On many Linux systems the tools dos2unix and unix2dos are available. On both Windows and Linux the small package tofrodos may be used. For details see the References documentation.
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