REdit – Reductionist’s Editor

A minimum of features but not less

REdit is another lightweight text editor that was created by using GTK+ (GTK3) toolkit. It is based on the GtkTextView widget and offers all the usual features expected from the program of this class that are implemented, for the most part, in a conventional manner. Additionally, the program provides several more advanced features like autoindent, highlighting of matching brackets, a.o.

You can create many views per document. To some extent, views are independent from one another, e.g. every view has the selection range and the cursor position of its own. This allows to process many parts of one document without scrolling.

The user can switch between a single-document mode, a multi-pane mode and a simplified MDI (Multiple-Document Interface). In the single-document mode the current view occupies the whole workspace. In the multi-pane mode, all the views can be displayed simultaneously in a tiled order, horizontally or vertically. The order of views can be changed by dragging a view with the mouse pointer. The size of view areas can be adjusted in one dimension (width by the horizontal tiling, height by the vertical one). A view can be minimized, i.e. it becomes not visible without being closed. The MDI mode offers a limited version of the classic Multiple-Document Interface how it was implemented in Windows API by Microsoft.

The program offers some basic features of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The syntax of supported languages can be highlighted. It is possible to start an external program from within REdit and then get the text output from that program displayed in a dialog window.

The spell checking feature offers both classic modes: auto check as well as processing text with a dialog suggesting words or word combinations as replacement for words considered as wrong written. Additionally, you can customize how the installed dictionaries are displayed and used.

Though, REdit is a plain text editor, it provides limited capabilities for formatting text (bold, italic, underline and strikethrough). It is possible to save formatted text to a file preserving formatting.

REdit supports output to several special formats: HTML and PDF (as well as PostScript and SVG). By saving text as PDF, you can set the necessary metadata (title, author, subject and keywords), provided, the Cairo library installed on your computer has version 1.16 or above. Whether this feature is supported is indicated by the state of corresponding text fields in the Print dialog.

In the status bar, two tiny clipboard viewers display the very begin of the text content contained in the data exchange buffers (CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY). Additionally to other, standard methods for insertion of content from the PRIMARY, the key combination Shift+Ctrl+V can be used.

The program provides a hex viewer that can display an open file or the content of a view in hexadecimal (byte) form (Tools -> Display Hexadecimal).

The program consists of one file and runs out of the box. It implements the single application concept (uniqueness), which means that only one instance of the application can be launched. New files are opened in the already running instance.

If you want that REdit saves settings, create an empty file redit.conf and save it either in the directory where the program file is saved, or in the following location: ~/.config/redit/redit.conf. Here, the tilde symbol means the home directory, e.g.: /home/andrew/.config/redit/redit.conf.

Version	Size	OS	Platform
1.5	321.5 K (329 184 bytes)	Linux Mint 17 (Ubuntu 14.04) or later	32-bit, GTK+ 3.10 or later
REdit
SHA-256: b482c95e3d0068b98909e34620c9232867f4668ce238423d91854291f38f871b