Minimum Profit 3.3.18b review

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Minimum Profit is a FREE text editor for programmers. If you are reading this (you are), you probably know what a text editor is a

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 288K
Developer: Angel Ortega
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Minimum Profit is a FREE text editor for programmers.

If you are reading this (you are), you probably know what a text editor is and thus I won't explain what 'open file', 'search and replace', 'tab size' and things like those, means. Only the special or not-so-intuitive features will be explained. In any other aspect, mp is just like
the text editor you were using until today, before you've found this unknown jewel that will change your life.

Much of Minimum Profit's behaviour is changeable from a configuration file, as key bindings, colors, the menu and other variables. Take a look at mprc.sample for details. The configuration files for Unix systems are /etc/mprc and $HOME/.mprc (see below to know how to set it in Win32).

Minimum Profit includes several interfaces:

curses: the good old text interface. You need any Unix (Linux, Solaris, IRIX, any BSD...) and the curses or ncurses library. It was also sucessfully compiled under BeOS (with a locally compiled ncurses) many years ago.
GTK: You need any X11 system with the GTK+ libraries installed. Support for GTK versions 1.2 and 2.0 is provided.
Win32: You need Microsoft Windows 95 or later and the lccwin32 compiler.

Here are some key features of "Minimum Profit":
Multiple files can be edited at the same time and blocks copied and pasted among them.
Syntax highlighting for many popular languages / file formats: C, C++, Perl, Shell Scripts, Ruby, Php, SQL, Python, HTML...
Creative use of tags: tags created by the external utility ctags are used to move instantaneously to functions or variables inside your current source tree. Tags are visually highlighted (underlined), and symbol completion can be triggered to avoid typing your own function names over and over.
Intelligent help system: pressing F1 over any word of a text being edited triggers the underlying system help (calling man when editing C or Shell files, perldoc with Perl, ri on Ruby, winhelp on MS Windows...).
Understandable interface: drop-down menus, reasonable default key bindings.
Configurable keys, menus and colors.
Text templates can be easily defined / accessed.
Multiplatform: Console/curses, GTK+ (1.2 and 2.0), MS Windows.
Automatic indentation, word wrapping, internal grep, learning / repeating functions.
Search and replace using plain text or regular expressions (including a special function to replace text on all open files).
Small memory footprint.
Multilingual.
Password-protected, encrypted text files (using the ARCFOUR algorithm).
It helps you abandon vi, emacs and other six-legged freaks definitely.
Awesome easter egg.

Installation

To compile under any Unix flavour, just run

$ ./config.sh
$ make

The first step should automatically detect all usable interfaces and
additional libraries and leave a Makefile behind. Previous Minimum Profit
versions used to need GNU Make; this is no longer true. By running

$ ./config.sh --help

you can see a list of tweakable options. Also, a bunch of README.* files are
included with Minimum Profit's standard distribution with information
specific to many systems and cross-compilers. Notoriously, if you have
the mingw32 cross-compiler suite in your Unix system, you can build an
MS Windows binary pretty easily (README.mingw32).

To install just run (as root):

# make install

and it will be instaled in /usr/local/bin. You can select an alternate
installation directory in the configuration phase; for example, to install
it on /usr/bin, do

$ ./config.sh --prefix=/usr/bin

What's New in This Release:
The replacement pattern in 'replace' now expands slashed characters as t and n and a new russian translation is included.

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