Thank you for taking time to download and install Ved. We hope you'll like it as much as the thousands of other users who have installed it over the years.
So, just what is Ved? Well, let's start off by stating that it is not emacs. Nor is it vi. Both of these popular editors have large followings. If you like them or their derivatives, then so be it. We're not going to try to change your tastes. Our editor borrows some features from both--but has its own unique personality. Furthermore, it is small and (we hope) easy to learn. With smallness and easiness we lose some of the features of the competition. For us, we've never figured out how to use 99% of the features of emacs, and we don't like the long delay it takes to start xemacs ....
And what does Ved stand for? Well, the ``ed'' part is obviously ``editor''. The ``V''? Well, it might stand for ``van der Poel'', or ``visual'', or even ``versatile''. Or, maybe all three-but then we'd have to call it VVVed, and that'd be dumb. So, until we can come up with a good alternative, lets just agree that Ved stands for ``A darn good editor''.
Ved has quite a long history and has been refined by the suggestions of countless users. It was first developed for the OS-9 Operating System1.1, an OS popular on the Tandy Color Computer and many other 6809 CPU based computers in the 1980s. Memory was a valuable resource in those days ... as a matter of fact, a single program was limited to a total of 64K (that's K not MEG!) of memory for both its program code and data areas. So, the first Ved was written in 6809 assembly language. The total code came in at just under 8K, leaving 56K for buffer memory. My, but we have progressed. One unfortunate aspect of this Ved was that it was married to the display and keyboard of the Tandy Color Computer. Scarce resources called for tradeoffs.
Ved was next ported to OS9s big brother, the OS-9/68000 OS1.2. Now, we were cooking along with much more memory and processing speed. So, Ved was rewritten in C with lots of new options. One of the big new features was that this Ved would run on terminals. We used the termcap data base and an involved (and, frankly, hard to use) method of defining control keys.
These two version of Ved were sold for real money. None of this free software nonsense in those ``good old days''. Lots of folks sent in their $20.00 or $40.00 checks. We even sold multi-site licenses for several hundred dollars. There's a point to all this ... we're not asking for money, but if you like and use Ved why not send us a nice picture postcard?
Time passes. Now, I'm using Linux1.3. More memory, more speed. For a long time a quick and dirty port of the OSK Ved sufficed. But, a lot of things in it just weren't ``Unix''. Add to that some maintainance problems ... we decided to do a complete rewrite and base the entire program on the ncurses library.
This version of Ved is entirely written in C. It was developed on Linux 2.0.xx using the 4.2 release of ncurses and libc 5.4.