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From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.editors,comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: SMG based editor on VAX/VMS
Message-ID: <2059@enea.se>
Date: 4 Sep 90 19:09:13 GMT
Organization: Enea Data AB, Sweden
Lines: 49


Just for the record, there is a Swedish company, Excosoft, who
has an editor, Exco, which uses SMG. Exco is also available for
some Unix machines and PCs. It was born on VMS and its default
key bindings are those of EDT with some differences.

It's some years since I used Exco, but let me say that is an
excellent concept. Those who have installed LSE 3.0, will recognize
some ideas. Exco is an hierarchical editor, which means you can
expand and compress lines as you like (hence the name EXpand COmpress)
to keep visible what you like to see for the moment. You can link 
a line to another line, which may be a line in another file.

Also, Exco allows you write code and pseudo-code in the same file.
In difference to LSE 3.0 this is achieved by using a special format
for Excofied files, meaning that a compilation must be preceeded by
an extraction operation. a quick task.

It comes with a formatter and a sort of environment, Excoshell.
Excoshell is stupid, but you don't have to use it. The editor/
formatter is excellent for writing technical documentation like
specifications and similar, since the hierarchical structure
saves you from all that .hl noise. The link facility makes
references to pages or chapters tremendously simple.

Exco is programmable. The language is not as powerful as the one
of TPU, but is in most cases sufficient for tailoring your own
editor. Special filters are still best written with TPU.

Performance as I recall is worse than TPU, but not disastrous.
Probably in par with or better than LSE. I don't know about
performance on Unix and MS/DOS.

Several big companies in Sweden uses Exco in their VMS environment.

Last time I asked, two years ago, they didn't have an email address.
Their hardcopy-mail address is:

      Excosoft AB
      Box 1270
      S-164 28 KISTA
      SWEDEN
      +46-8-7520380

I have no commercial interest whatsoever in Excosoft. I just think they
have a good product.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
In the real world there are no colours.