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What is mined?

Mined is a text editor, small and easy to use, yet powerful.
It is Unicode-capable, using UTF-8 encoding (also converts UTF-16 input).
(It can also handle mixed 8/16 bit charsets as used for Chinese.)
It has mouse support (in text mode terminals), menus, a scrollbar and 
visible indications of special characters (esp. TABs and different line-ends).

Mined has an intuitive, simple way of operation. No modes.
Cursor positioning is intuitive and without weird limitations at line-end, 
no insert/append confusion.
Control-key layout is "geometric" for basic cursor movements (also known 
as "WordStar" layout). (Cursor keys can be used as well, of course.)
A "HOP" key amplifies any subsequent movement command (and some other 
commands) in an intuitive sense. This way, a lot of functions can be 
achieved quickly without remembering as many control or function keys.

Mined handles changes of the terminal/window size immediately and 
correctly in any state of interaction (exception for the DOS version).

Mined offers security against file handling mistakes. It will not accidently 
overwrite a file that has not explicitly been opened for editing before 
without prompting. It will not exit from a changed text without saving 
or explicit confirmation. If it should crash (which has not happened for 
years) it still tries to save the text and even continue the edit session.
File handling errors are reported clearly and not crippled.

Mined has some support for paragraph adjustment, HTML tag entry, 
identifier search, "tags" file search (cross-file search for identifiers), 
special input support (Unicode), smart quotes, Unicode combined 
characters, and more.
Search and replacement patterns may include new-lines.

Mined handles line-ends of different operating system and displays them 
differently. Full binary transparency is supported when editing.


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Copyright/license

For legal purposes, the GNU general public license applies (see the file 
LICENSE.GNU).

The intention is that the editor mined may be freely used, compiled, 
ported to other systems or adapted to specific preferences.
I do however appreciate that you please report any changes to 
mined@towo.net for feedback and optional inclusion in further versions.

Also redistributions should not take license/royalty fees for the use 
of mined or any derived version (it is not very clear to the software 
community what exactly the GNU license means in this respect).
Redistributions within software collections are welcome.
Please notify them to mined@towo.net and if the distribution is on 
a fixed media (CD), I appreciate being offered a free copy.

Although high effort was taken to prevent mined from loosing users' 
edited data, no liability is accepted for any loss or damage whatsoever.


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Quick start

From the makefiles included in the package, select one closest to your 
operating system and invoke make -f makefile....
Place the compiled program (file "mined") into a binary directory within 
your path.
Configure your environment so that MINEDHELPFILE gives the name of 
the online help archive mined.hlp from the mined archive (top directory), 
or use "make install" to place files at standard locations.

For Unicode (UTF-8) operation:
* Use a newer version of xterm (>= 145 recommended), configure with 
  the script doc/configure-xterm from the mined archive.
* Install Unicode fonts for your X server from 
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz 
  and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-asian.tar.gz for 
  Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters.
* Start xterm with the script doc/uterm from the mined archive.
  (Or follow the instructions in the Unicode Howto of the mined 
  homepage http://towo.net/mined/)


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Platforms

Mined is developed for Unix environments but is intended to be portable.
DOS versions compile with Cygwin, EMX, djgcc (see makefiles) and 
even Turbo-C.
Mined also used to run on VMS but I could not check that lately.
See also doc/compilation.


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