Maintaning AEE: Another Easy Editor

Introduction

In the unix space, terminal text editors have been the battle grounds of holy wars. From Vi vs Emacs to the modern Micro vs Nano, EE and AEE have just been here. That whole time. This is just another text editor. And a simple one.

Why I Maintain This Fork

I maintain this fork because someone has to, and the original developer is dead. The original AEE was a masterpiece of simple programming, but it was ancient, and it hadn’t been buildable for a while. Rather than abandon it to obsolescence, I:

1. Ripped out the original build system and replaced it with a modern one.
2. Removed unneccessary cruft that made it only useful on ancient unixes.
3. Began to modernize the code.

What Makes AEE Special

Using EE for the first time was a revelation to me. It made me wonder why no other terminal text editor was as easy to use as it was. Then i found AEE. AEE was a port of EE that had the unfortunate state of being incomplete, and relying on code conventions too old to be useful.

Technical Changes

The changes I made were surgical:

• Switched from create.make scripts to a CMake configuration.
• With the above, converted to ncurses, removing the obsolete new_curse subset and the equally unusable xcurse setup.
• began to update the C code.

Use Cases

This editor is for when you need to make quick edits without ceremony. When you’re debugging a config file at 3 AM and don’t want to fight your tools.

Installation and Usage

Install (AUR):

yay -S aee-anoraktrend-git

Usage:

aee /path/to/file.txt

The source code is intentionally readable. You can understand the entire editor in an afternoon — something you can’t say about most modern software.