Easy Editor: It’s Not Just for BSD 0

Easy Editor running in FreeBSD VM on Slackware –Current.

I have lately been playing with BSD, particularly FreeBSD. (As an aside, the BSD documentation is excellent; the FreeBSD Handbook is one of the best documents of its type that I’ve seen.)

The BSD Handbook suggested that new users use ee (“Easy Editor”), a program I had not heard of before, though the far more powerful and complex vi editor is also included out-of-the-box (in *nix, configuration is generally accomplished through plain text, at least for those distros that have not yet fallen for the seductive blandishments of SystemD).

Just for grins and giggles, I went looking for ee yesterday, and it is surprisingly hard to find. For one thing, search results are flooded with links that promise to provide an “easy editor” for your drag-and-drop (pfui!) web site. As near as I can find, it hasn’t been updated since 2005.

I did find an online copy of the man page and a download page at Softpedia. Its home page, according to Softpedia, is a university in the UK, and said University doesn’t seem to want to talk about it any more.

I downloaded the sources from Softpedia and it did compile and install on Slackware —Current. The *.tgz was less than 70kb in size.

A screen shot showing the pop-up menu, which is invoked by ESC, is below the fold.