E

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The minimalistest text editor.

 Author:   Peter Sussman
 Homepage: https://github.com/the8thbit/e
 Family:   none?
 Platform: UNIX 
 License:  GNU AGPL v. 3+

Weighing in at about half the memory footprint of ed, e is the most minimalist text editor I am aware of. This is achieved through its ridiculously minimalist feature set. e has no output, and only takes four commands: save (ctrl+d), close (ctrl+f), seek left (ctrl+j), and seek right (ctrl+k). e only takes one command-line argument, the path of the file you want to edit. Part of my goal in writing e was to distil the concept of a text editor down to its bare minimum, where removing any functionality would change the fundamental nature of the software. Because of the heavy reliance on UNIX system APIs, e will only compile and run on UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

The name "E" has been used for other text editors. The most notable of these E editors, perhaps, was initially distributed in 1984 from IBM's Research Division. Designed and written by ClarkMaurer?, who also originated the award winning and widely used SlickEdit programmers editor, E was a fast and flexible text editor that was initially most notable for handling very large files in DOS extended memory. Subsequent versions of E, including E2, E3, EOS2?, and [OS/2 Enhanced Editor]? included a powerful REXX-like programming language that was used to develop early versions of syntax-directed editing, a capability that SlickEdit continues to be acclaimed for. If you liked that various members of the E editor family, you might want to try SlickEdit or other editors in the IbmEditorFamily, like X2 or PE..

Another E was actually Ecce, but was known as E because the early operating systems on which it ran generally used single-letter commands (like D for Delete, C for Compile, E for Edit, etc).