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 configuration files or C++
source code. 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) 2005-2017 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.
