XED is a text editor for XML document instances. It is designed to support hand-authoring of small-to-medium size XML documents, and is optimised for keyboard input. It works very hard to ensure that you cannot produce a non-well-formed document. Although it does not validate, the results of offline validation can be accessed, and it does read DTDs and keep track of your document structure, and provides context-based accelerators to make element and attribute entry fast and easy.
XED keeps track of all the changes you make in your document, so that you can undo changes, as many as you need to, if you make a mistake. This makes it easy to learn: if you're not sure whether a particular command will do what you want, just try it! If the results are not what you wanted, you can Undo them.
A non-exhaustive inventory of features provided by XED:
XED is based on the LTG's LT XML toolkit, and uses Python and Tk to provide an efficient and portable user interface. Some of XED's limitations derive from limitations of this substrate:
.HLP
files are now distributed as part of the WIN32 release,
and .html
versions are in the UN*X release. If you're using
the latter, the help is here. Otherwise,
there's a (stale) version on
the web.
Beta versions of XED are available for trial evaluation and individual use. I will not be posting new release announcements as I fix bugs, but I will respond to all bug reports. This beta release, is available only as a self-extracting installation for WIN32 users.
A Macintosh version may be available in the medium term.
Please send all bug reports, suggestions for changes and enhancements, etc. to ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk.
XED was produced in the Language Technology Group, part of the Human Communication Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Baseline funding for HCRC's work originally came from the UK Economic and Social Research Council: work on XED is now supported by LTG reserves.