QE is a simple text editor loosely modelled after IBM's E Editor and Aaron Lawrence's AE. It is written using Qt4 and is therefore reasonably cross-platform.

The philosophy behind QE is to provide a simple tool for quickly reading and/or editing text files. It is not a programmer's editor, word processor, or document manager. As such, it doesn't provide developer features like syntax highlighting, code completion, folding, compiler integration, or anything else that could get in the user's way, clutter up the interface, or cause lengthy load times.

What it does aim to provide is the essentials for viewing and editing plain text. This includes straightforward yet flexible search and replace, a go-to-line feature, basic printing support, the ability to read text files in different encodings, and full support for displaying Unicode text.

More information is available at: https://github.com/altsan/qe-text-editor/wiki

Manual installation for various platforms is described below. RPM or other installable packages may be available elsewhere.

Make sure you have the following runtime packages installed. Most of these are available in zip, WarpIN, and/or yum/rpm distributions:

• Qt4 runtime version 4.7.3 or later
• klibc (1:0.1.4) and libgcc (9.2.0)

Copy QE.EXE to a directory in your PATH, and QE.HLP to a directory in your HELP path. Create a program object for QE.EXE if you wish.

Create a directory for QE and copy QE.EXE into it. Create a shortcut for QE.EXE.

If you do not have the Qt4 and GCC/MingW 4.8.2 runtime libraries installed, you must also extract the contents of qe_win32-mingw-qt4_libs.zip either into the same directory, or to a directory on your PATH.

To enable online help support, copy QE.QCH and QE.QHC into the same directory as QE.EXE. If you do not have Qt installed system-wide, you must also extract the contents of qe_win32-mingw-qt4_assistant.zip either into the same directory, or to a directory on your PATH.

Make sure the Qt4 and gcc runtime libraries are installed (using your distribution's package manager), along with QtAssistant if you want online help support.

Copy qe into a pathed directory (such as /usr/local/bin), along with qe.qch and qe.qhc if you want online help support.

GCC, GNU Make, and the Qt4 development libraries for your platform are required. As long as these are all installed correctly, building the executable should be as simple as running qmake qe.pro followed by make (or make release under Windows, if you are building the non-debug version).

Building the help is somewhat more complicated. The help file source is in IBM IPF format. Under OS/2 this is compiled to HLP using the IPFC compiler: run ipfc qe.ipf from inside the help subdirectory.

However, on Windows and Linux the help must be converted to QtAssistant format, which involves converting the IPF file to HTML and then running qcollectiongenerator. The script makehtml.cmd performs the first part of this task; it is written in REXX and has been confirmed to work with classic REXX under OS/2, and Regina REXX under Windows. It also requires the SED utility (GNU sed or the equivalent) and GNU iconv to run. This script runs qe.ipf through the SED script ipfhtml.sed, converts the encoding to UTF-8, splits the resulting output into single-section HTML files, and ensures that any IPF links are converted to the proper URIs. Once this is done, you will have a series of qe.*.html files; running qcollectiongenerator qe.qhcp -o qe.qhc should then generate the final QtAssistant help files.

To compile the message files, if required, run lrelease qe.pro (if the Qt4 binaries are not in your path, you may have to prefix the command with the path to the appropriate directory, e.g. /usr/lib/qt4/bin).

Message file sources for various languages are in the language/ subdirectory. These can be translated using QtLinguist or a text editor. To make sure the files are in sync with the latest English sources before translating, run lupdate qe.pro (see the note above about the path to the Qt4 binaries).

All message files should use UTF-8 encoding.

Help file source in help/ should also be translated. Copy qe.ipf to either qe_xx.ipf or qe_xx_yy.ipf (where 'xx' is the two-letter ISO code for your language, and 'yy' is the two-letter code for a particular country or region) and use your preferred text or INF editor to translate the contents.

Unlike message files, translated IPF files should use the native OS/2 codepage for the target language (this is CP850 for most Latin languages).

You will also need to translate the files qe.qhp and qe.qhcp to update the titles and keywords. These two files should be UTF-8 encoded.

See 'Building from Source' (above) for help file build instructions.

QE Text Editor
Copyright (C) 2018-2022 Alexander Taylor

A few routines were derived from examples in "C++ GUI Programming with Qt4" (Second Edition) by Jasmin Blanchette & Mark Summerfield.

OS/2 version includes the public domain "EAString" module by Roger Orr.

OS/2 native file dialog code is derived in part from the Mozilla for OS/2 project.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.