                      Welcome to THE, The Hessling Editor.

INTRODUCTION
------------

THE is a full-screen character mode text editor based on the VM/CMS editor
XEDIT and some features of KEDIT for DOS written by Mansfield Software.

THE has currently been ported to the following platforms:
- most Unix systems; text mode and native X11 application
- OpenEdition on OS/390
- Linux/390
- 32bit DOS 
- OS/2
- Win32 
- QNX
- Amiga
- BeOS
A MS-Windows 3.1 version is also available as a shareware release.

THE OS/2 port is similar to EPM, runs within an OS/2 command window and is
HPFS aware. THE also uses the OS/2 Rexx interpreter to execute macro files.
An extensive interface exists between THE and Rexx giving THE the complete
power of Rexx.

Rexx support in the DOS DPMI and VCPI ports, QNX, Amiga and BeOS ports is 
provided by the free Rexx interpreter, Regina, which is available from
ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/pub/hessling/Regina/regina??.zip
(where ?? is the current version)
THE OS/2 version uses the Rexx interpreter that is supplied with OS/2.
The Win9x/NT/2000 ports can use one of several Rexx interpreters. THE uses
the Rexx/Trans DLL which enables THE to find a suitable Rexx interpreter
at runtime.

For Unix ports, Rexx support is available with Regina (see above) and with
REXX/imc (http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/users/ian.collier/Rexx/tarfiles.html)
Under the AIX platform, THE can also use REXX/6000, available from IBM.


THELIST: A Mailing list for announcements and discussion of THE.
---------------------------------------------------------------

A mailing list has been created for discussion of THE. You can subscribe
to it by sending an email message to listserv@uiuc.edu with the body of 
the email message containing:

SUBSCRIBE THELIST Your Name

eg.
SUBSCRIBE THELIST Joe Bloggs

To send messages to other subscribers, send an email message to
thelist@uiuc.edu


Where to get THE
----------------

THE is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more details see the file COPYING that should have accompanied this
file.

THE is available from the following sites:

 North America:  ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/pub/hessling/THE/
                 ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/packages/THE/
                 http://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/
 Germany:        ftp://ftp.rzg.mpg.de/pub/software/the/THE/
                 ftp://ftp.germany.eu.net/pub/comp/sysv/THE/
 Austria:        ftp://ftp.wu-wien.ac.at/pub/src/Editors/THE/
 Australia:      http://ftp.qut.edu.au/pub/markh/THE/
                 http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/

Files available:

the??djg.zip            - version ?.? extended DOS (DPMI) executable and documentation
the??vcp.zip            - version ?.? extended DOS (VCPI) executable and documentation
the??R_os2.zip          - version ?.? OS/2 executable and documentation (uses Regina Rexx)
the??O_os2.zip          - version ?.? OS/2 executable and documentation (uses OS/2 Rexx)
the??T_w32.zip          - version ?.? Win95/NT executable and documentation
thesrc??.zip            - source code for version ?.?
THE-?.?.tar.gz          - source code for version ?.?
thehtm??.zip            - HTML documentation for version ?.?

thedit??.zip            - version ?.? MS-Windows 3.11 port (shareware)

Pre-compiled binaries for various Unix systems are also available from 
the sites above.

All zip files use Info-Zip's Zip 2.01.
Also note that the source files will be in Unix format (LF only to end line)
so unzipping under OS/2, DOS or Win95/NT  use the -a switch.


Notes on Source Distribution:
----------------------------

THE uses curses as its screen handler. This makes it portable but not 
necessarily as fast as native screen handling routines.

To compile the DOS, OS/2 and Win32 ports you need PDCurses 2.3 (or later); a
public domain library of curses screen handling routines, of which I am 
the current maintainer. PDCurses 2.3 is available from:

 North America:  ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/pub/hessling/PDCurses/
 Germany:        ftp://ftp.rzg.mpg.de/pub/software/the/THE/
 Australia:      http://ftp.qut.edu.au/pub/markh/PDCurses/
                 http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/

You also require PDCurses 2.3 (or later) for the X11 port.

To assist with configuring THE to compile under Unix, a "configure" script
is included. This script should be able to set up most, if not all
requirements for compilation. Run configure with the --help switch to
determine what configuration options are available.

********************* Note to Users of Borland C++ 2.0 *****************
There is a bug in the stat() function that returns an error if you call
stat() with the root directory. This causes any sos_edit of a directory
that will resolve to the root directory to think it is a new file.
The bug in stat() has been fixed in release 3.0.
********************* Note to Users of Borland C++ 2.0 *****************

If you find bugs or major inconsistencies, please let me know. If you
manage to compile and run on a different platform to the above, please
send me any changes to the code and the makefile, so I can include the
patches in the official release.

Enjoy, Mark.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Mark Hessling,  M.Hessling@qut.edu.au  http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/
 Author of THE, a Free XEDIT/KEDIT editor and, Rexx/SQL
 Maintainer of PDCurses: Public Domain Curses and, Regina Rexx interpreter
 Use Rexx ? join the Rexx Language Association: http://www.rexxla.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
