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What is the oldest application you use?
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Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 10, 2017 at 09:59 PM
The application I’ve used longer than any is MS Word—going back to the late 1980s with WinWord 1.0 on Windows 2. Although I preferred WordStar, which I used from the early 1980s (I think) but WordStar stopped getting better and rotted away by the late 1980s. I’m sure somewhere I have some WinWord files from those days.
The Mac software I’ve used longest is Tinderbox and DEVONthink.
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 10, 2017 at 10:34 PM
xtabber wrote:
>John McPhee has used Kedit
>exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he
>discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this
>forum would probably find worthwhile reading.
This sounds interesting… If I read that book, would it convince me to shell out $99 for Kedit?
Or are there cheaper alternatives that can do what McPhee likes about it?
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 10, 2017 at 10:38 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Your mention of KEdit reminds me that an application that is a bit old
>on my Windows machine, but which I use almost daily is NoteTab. I use
>6.2 standard, which I like better than version 7, because it maintains a
>standard extended selection editing. I not only like writing in NoteTab
>—which edits plain text—but I use it for cleaning up text from
>others before I import it into InDesign. I think it is a great little
>app.
Indeed. I use the free version daily for the very same purpose (cleaning up text, especially when copied from PDFs), it’s always running.
I also have some tabs open automatically when the app is launched, with stuff I need to remind myself about, such as Autohotkey shortcuts or how to manually edit raw EndNote code.
Posted by moritz
Nov 11, 2017 at 01:40 AM
Kedit is extremely nice and powerful, I used it to write a 400 page book (in LaTeX ...). We’re talking 1991 here, using the DOS version Kedit 5.0.
Some standout features include the “all” and “more” commands:
The all “keyword” command would limit selection to lines that included the “keyword” - more could then be used to expand the content around it.
Super helpful to check and modify terminology and cross-references.
Kedit was also known for its REXX support, due to its XEDIT IBM mainframe legacy ...
Count me in as a fan!
Dr Andus wrote:
xtabber wrote:
>>John McPhee has used Kedit
>>exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he
>>discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this
>>forum would probably find worthwhile reading.
>
>This sounds interesting… If I read that book, would it convince me to
>shell out $99 for Kedit?
>
>Or are there cheaper alternatives that can do what McPhee likes about
>it?
Posted by Lucas
Nov 11, 2017 at 05:08 AM
I would also like to thank xtabber for mentioning John McPhee’s book, which I was unaware of.
Perhaps this could be a separate topic, but in the past I have searched quite a bit for other editors like Kedit that provide such “line-oriented” editing. It would be great to have more options filling this niche. In my past searches for text editors that provide some form of saved searches for lines of text within a document, I have found UltraEdit to be the most capable, although EditPad Pro also does this. And there are certainly other options, especially for Windows. I liked the UltraEdit option because I could use it on my Mac, too, although I have yet to purchase it.
xtabber wrote:
I’ve been using the Kedit text editor from Mansfield Software
>Group on a daily basis since 1985. Kedit is based on the IBM mainframe
>Xedit and is line-oriented (most text editors are buffer-oriented) which
>gives it database-like selective editing capabilities that other text
>editors simply can’t match.
>