Dred Help

Description

Dred is a lightweight, customizeable, and extensible Unicode text editor. It comes, complete with documentation, in a single executable jar (~256K). It was written in Java 1.5 and needs a Java 1.5 (or later) runtime. I have used it as my only text editor since it was built more than a decade ago.

It comes packaged with several extensions, including simple tools to support the input of html/xml and Latex; and to manage the invocation of programs such as latex, make, subversion, cvs, rcs, ant, and bash. Additional tools can easily be added by a modestly-competent Java programmer (Note added in 2012: The extension API was designed ad-hoc and almost certainly requires more understanding on the part of an extension writer than the documentation provides).

Resources

Installing Dred (Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X)

  1. Ensure you have a recent Java installed.
  2. Either
    1. Download the current Dred.jar file
    2. Put the file in a directory, and run it.
      • On Unix systems this can be done with the shell command: java -jar Dred.jar
      • On Windows systems this can usually be done by doublelicking on Dred.jar. If WinRAR or some other file archiver has "registered" .jar files as archives, you will have to open a command window and give the command java -jar Dred.jar
    3. The previous step should open an editing window on an "anonymous" file. Use one of the Help menu entries to get access to the documentation, and a description of the current bindings. On Windows I recommend that you unpack the documentation and read it using explorer.
    or
    1. Download the current AppleDred.app file
    2. Then read the section in the manual on Mac OS X Usage.
  3. If you don't want the trouble of finding out how to bind shortcuts and abbreviations to your favourite Unicode characters, then you can get a kickstart by using the ones I use. This will do the trick: 
                    java -jar Dred.jar --bindings=dred://dred-bs.bindings
                
© (2005) Bernard Sufrin
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