Description

GNU moe is a powerful, 8-bit clean, console text editor for ISO-8859 and
ASCII character encodings. It has a modeless, user-friendly interface,
online help, multiple windows, unlimited undo/redo capability, unlimited
line length, unlimited buffers, global search/replace (on all buffers at
once), block operations, automatic indentation, word wrapping, file name
completion, directory browser, duplicate removal from prompt histories,
delimiter matching, text conversion from/to UTF-8, romanization, etc.

Moe can easily edit thousands of files at the same time.

Moe uses ISO-8859-15 instead of UTF-8 because an 8-bit character set
(combined with romanization if needed) can convey meaning safely and more
efficiently than UTF-8 can.

UTF-8 is a great tool for tasks like writing books of mathematics or mixing
Greek with Chinese in the same document. But for many other everyday
computing and communication tasks, an 8-bit code like ISO-8859-15 is much
more practical, efficient and reliable. There is no such thing as an
'invalid' or 'out of range' ISO-8859-15 character.

UTF-8 is fine for non-parsable, non-searchable documents that must look
'pretty', but not so fine for things like filenames, configuration files or
C++ source code. Invalid UTF-8 characters in filenames make archiving and
filesystem operations unreliable. UTF-8 greatly hinders parsability (and may
even become a security risk) by providing multiple similar-looking
variations of basic alphabetic, punctuation, and quoting characters. UTF-8
also makes search difficult and unreliable. For example, searching for a
word like "file" in an UTF-8 document may fail if the document uses the
compound character 'fi' instead of the string "fi".

Moe tries to rationalize the keyboard commands. The <Alt> key is used for
harmless commands like cursor movements and scrolling. The <Control> key is
used for more 'dangerous' commands like copying text blocks, deleting lines,
or exiting. The <Tab> key is used for file name completion and also
shows/hides the directory browser when moe asks for a file name to save or
load. In any case, the unlimited undo/redo capability of moe makes very
difficult to accidentally cause an irreparable damage to your files.

Moe uses the function keys so that the most frequent commands can be issued
with only one finger. The function key <F1> shows the online help, and <F10>
allows you to change the options. The online help and some experience with
text editors is all you need to start using moe. Reading the manual is only
required for more advanced uses of moe.

To have moe used as your default editor you need to set the environment
variables 'EDITOR=moe' and/or 'VISUAL=moe' in your shell initialization file
($HOME/.profile if you are using bash).

If your text console doesn't show all the ISO-8859-15 characters, try the
'setfont' command from the 'kbd' package.

Moe needs a screen size of at least 24 lines by 80 columns. Take this into
account if running it from a terminal emulator.


Copyright (C) 2005-2019 Antonio Diaz Diaz.

This file is free documentation: you have unlimited permission to copy,
distribute and modify it.

The file Makefile.in is a data file used by configure to produce the
Makefile. It has the same copyright owner and permissions that configure
itself.
