The earliest precursor which I, the present author, know of was called XEDIT and turned up at the Computer Centre of the University of Heidelberg in 1975. That XEDIT had nothing to do with the editors nowadays known under that name and which are more or less spread all over the world. It was only a local appearance in the computing center of the university of Heidelberg in Germany. The further parts of this paragraph deal also only with the situation in Heidelberg. Fairly soon XEDIT had become a fullscreen editor for the timesharing system (TSO) of IBM's operating system MVS. As the user interface of XEDIT was quite pleasant, it was nearly completely imitated in the construction of the user interface of the editor HADES (formerly called AMOS). HADES was an essential component of the timesharing system of the same name (operating under MVS as well).
When the current exaEdit author was confronted with the necessity to turn to the operating system Unix, he got a culture shock - not only but chiefly in the field of editors (key words: vi, emacs). He came out of this shock with every intention to keep alive the - in his view - tried and tested parts of XEDIT (e.g. concept and user interface) in the Unix version. Since it is not possible to transfer a large and complex program which has been developed by means of software methods in the 70ies, the rewriting of the editor was inescapable. As programming language for this venture C was chosen, not out of sympathy but as the result of the choice of the least evil.
At first the name xed had been chosen for the program in order to make a distinction between this editor and others called xedit in the operating system VM of IBM and in the operating system Unix. But xed turned out to be a frequently used short form (e.g. in directories) for editors called xedit (in Unix). For this reason, the editor which will be described in this manual was renamed to pedit in March 1996.
Since 1993 the editor has been usable in the operating system AIX, although it has experienced large improvemements and enhancements since that time.
A stable version (10A) was offered in March 1994 at
the Computer Centre of the University of Heidelberg for usage under the
operating system AIX, and it was offered as public domain
software as well (see previous section
How to Get exaEdit.).
In the following time versions for the Unix operating systems HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, OSF1, and SunOS, for OS/2, and for all 32 bit Windows systems have been developed.
The renaming from xed to pedit was not very practical as could be seen afterwards, because pedit was also a name for various editors worldwide. Therefore the editor was renamed again in the year 2004 to
exaEdit
The current version is 02.