Introduction

The A-Shell Editor is a productivity tool designed for needs of A-Shell developers.

The Editor was first conceived as a substitute for VUE that would allow the use of editing features common in Windows programming environments. After a basic VUE-substitute was built, additional features were added until the Editor had become a true Windows programming environment with its own commands and tools.

What began as just an editing tool has become much more. The Editor is now fully integrated with the A-Shell compiler, supports multiple scripts to run tasks before and after compiling, runs the compiled program directly in A-Shell, and has different publishing options like e-mail and compressed files.

The features mentioned here are just a small part of the tools available in the Editor. The unifying aspect of all the features and tools is that are useful to A-Shell developers.

The Editor dramatically reduces the number of characters typed, as compared to VUE.

The Editor dramatically reduces the time consumed in post-compile tasks, especially in error trapping.

The Editor dramatically reduces the time spent searching A-Shell documentation and reference materials, and includes embedded and customizable help.

The Editor considerably improves the organization and documentation of programs by the use of "Projects." A project is a group of files that relate to each other in some way meaningful to you (i.e. a program, module, application, etc.); the developer is free to define the relationships and identify all the related files. They can be in the same or different folders, and can be grouped together by the Editor for any reason whatsoever.

The net result of using the Editor will be a huge saving of time over standard programming techniques, plus improved organization of programs and their related files.