Snapshots: WinEdt in Action

WinEdt was designed with the goal of providing a Windows-like (easy-to-use) editing environment, while allowing more demanding users to take advantage of its highly customizable interface. Furthermore, most customizations do not require any programming skills or familiarity with WinEdt's macro language.

Besides the standard editing features, WinEdt supports:

  Wrapping, Block/Column Selection and Operations, Highlighting,
  Spell-Checking and on-the-spot highlighting of misspelled words,
  Delimiters matching, Translation Tables, Macro Facility,
  user-definable Graphic Interfaces, DDE, Project Manager, etc...

  WinEdt can collect certain information (such as "Table of Contents"
  or "Labels") in your documents and use it for quick moving and
  referencing.


WinEdt's flexibility includes:

  * completely customizable Menu Bar (including shortcut keys)
  * completely customizable Tool Bar
  * User-Defined Popup Menus for context sensitive response to the
  right mouse button and/or (double) shortcut keys

For advanced users, WinEdt provides further means to customize the
program by also offering:

  * A Simple Macro Language
  * Transparent conversion of TeX equivalents to 8-bit international
  characters (eg. accented characters) during Reading and Saving
  * A definition of double-stroke (emacs-like) shortcuts through a
  flexible Popup Menu mechanism
  * The ability to set-up context sensitive commands
  * Special Graphic Interfaces that allow users to associate an
  array of Icons with certain commands or macros
  * Fast Compilation of a "Table of Contents" or "Labels" for quick
  positioning or referencing (respectively)
  * Automatic Delimiter matching...
* Active Strings and Command Completion functionality (a very
  powerful and flexible feature)...

WinEdt's default settings and appearance:

WinEdt provides a special GUI Page Control containing almost 500 buttons associated with TeX symbols. You can make this control Visible by checking the "Show GUI Page Control" Option in the Context Menu belonging to the Menu/ Tool Bar Control. The control and its contents are user customizable. WinEdt's on-line Help will guide you through the customization, should you decide to embark on it.

Context popup menus (such as the one above) provide additional functionality, as well as less frequently used options. Most Dialogs and Controls respond to a right mouse button click by calling their popup context menu.

Note auto-delimiter matching in action. Observe also that the alternative View of the same document has been selected (the first Status Line Panel now displays "B" for a secondary view: clicking on this panel toggles between two alternative instances of the same document). Line Numbers have been displayed for visual feedback (in the default settings a shortcut Ctrl+= toggles visibility of the line numbers)...

WinEdt is extremely customizable. You can completely redefine the Menu contents and default shortcuts, change the colors of its controls, rearrange the Tool Bar buttons, modify the highlighting schemes, etc. Here is a sample of an alternative setup (HTML Configuration):

The example below briefly illustrates WinEdt's spell-checking ability:

The commands Check Word (Shift+Enter) and Complete Word (Ctrl+Enter) in the tools menu are real life-savers. Note that misspelled words are (by default) highlighted in red and underlined. This auto-spelling functionality can be turned off by clicking on the Spell panel in the status line. The same applies to other panels in the status line: they respond to mouse clicks.

In particular, WinEdt supports standard (LINE) mode copy, cut and paste operations as well as Block (Column) selection mode. This can come handy if you want to manipulate columns of data: selection mode can be toggled by clicking on the LINE panel in the status line. Note that choosing the Block Mode selection temporarily disables auto-wrapping and enables the "free caret interface". After you are finished with the Block Selection Mode you should restore the default behavior (click on the Block Panel to restore the "standard" LINE selection mode).

The best way to see more WinEdt's features is to download the program and give it a try!