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				Opening Windows onto Qedit Beloved HP 3000 programmers tool gets fast Windows client, cross-platform links
		Qedit for Windows Version 4.6.03 Robelle Consulting Ltd. Unit 201, 15399-102A Ave. Surrey, BC, Canada V3R 7K1 Phone 888-ROBELLE FAX 604-582-1799 email: info@robelle.com Qedit for Windows includes the client interface software and either the HP 3000-based Qedit program, or an upgrade to Qedit to support the Windows client if you already own Qedit. It requires TCP/IP support on your 3000 and Remote Process Management (RPM) listener software. Qedit for Windows supports opening multiple files across the 3000, 9000 and local PCs. Qedit for Windows runs on Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95 and NT and requires 4Mb of memory and 3Mb of disk space. Qedit server software is supported on both HP 3000 and HP 9000. Current Qedit owners have an upgrade price of $1,000 for the server; the client ranges from $150 to $200 per copy depending on number of copies. The product costs $5,000 for the host based server software for new customers. Until Jan. 31 Robelle has special introductory pricing: $500 for the server upgrade and two free copies of the client software.		Review by Shawn M. Gordon Qedit has been the editor of choice for many people in the HP 3000 world, and its fans are very enthusiastic – rather like the vi fans in the Unix world. A few years back Robelle ported Qedit to Unix, and the company has now created a client/server version that lets you run a nice Windows-standard editor client to edit local files, 3000-based files or 9000-based files. Since Qedit’s robust command line has been one of the main reasons for its popularity, I was wondering how a client-server version would fare, especially given the ever-more-crowded nature of this market segment. For brevity I will refer to Qedit for Windows as QWIN throughout my review. How does it work? Unlike just about every other client-server tool that I have evaluated, QWIN doesn’t require a server job to be running on the HP 3000 to serve client requests. This is an advantage in that it means there’s one less background job for you to worry about. It’s something of a disadvantage in that it actually generates a logon to the HP 3000 and therefore depletes your session limit, although it doesn’t count against your user license limit. I did some checking on this. Figure 1 below shows that QWIN appears to actually run the host-based Qedit program as opposed to a special server program. This is not a bad trick and kind of clever. It looks like this design choice is one reason that QWIN’s implementation and communication layer is very fast. Installation and Documentation The installation is a piece of cake, but it is done in two phases. You need to install the host-based software on your HP 3000 with the supplied tape. This is very simple, and Robelle has done a very clean job. You then install the client software, which is also very straightforward and follows the current standards for Windows installation programs.

The documentation is clean and robust, filled with screen snapshots and easy to read text. It is indexed and contains a table of contents for quick reference. The online help for the client software was good, but seemed to be a little incomplete. For example, I could find no reference to the “push cursor/pop cursor” commands and had to ask for help from Robelle tech support. I didn’t notice anything else missing in the online help system. Robelle reports that it has since enhanced the documentation so it’s easier to find cursor instructions.

Features
QWIN isn’t meant to be a word processor, but a code editor. This means you’re not going to see a lot of control over things like fonts, colors or frames. Instead you’ll see a high speed editor, one that can easily edit local or host-based files. I found the best features to be the product’s speed, searching ability and its capability to edit multiple files at the same time – across multiple platforms if you like. I didn’t test QWIN’s ability to edit files across an intranet or the Internet. This could be a pretty handy feature if you are out on the road or need to edit remotely, especially if your HP 3000 is on a network of any kind.

		SYS.PUB% SHOWPROC #S430 QPRI CPUTIME STATE JOBNUM PIN (PROGRAM) STEP #s430, shawn,mgr.smga,pub (ldev 44) B152 0:00.094 WAIT S430 256 (JSMAIN.PUB.SYS) C152 0:00.018 WAIT S430 585 :??? C152 0:00.148 TRMIO S430 460 (RPMDAD.NET.SYS) C152 0:00.306 WAIT S430 574 (CI.PUB.SYS) QEDIT.PUB.ROBELLE “-dxPc6f6b754052f -t” C152 0:00.936 IPC S430 155 (QEDIT.PUB.ROBELLE) -dxPc6f6b754052f -t Figure 1

The Test Drive
QWIN really couldn’t be any easier to set up and use, which is very nice. Figure 2 shows an example of the program with four different files open; the pane in the upper right corner has two views of the same file open. This feature works like the code editor in Microsoft’s Visual Basic, which I found to be nice – the dual view in VB is one of the few things I like about Visual Basic. This is one of the main features that sets QWIN apart from other client/server editors that I have used and evaluated.

From the screen shot above, you can see I turned on the ruler and line numbers. These are optional and can be enabled and disabled at will. If you are used to editing on the HP 3000, this information can add a degree of programmer comfort.

In the screen shot’s upper left corner you will see a little triangle and a little “lollipop.” The triangle is a tab stop, a tool that lets you create new tab stops by dragging them down into the document. The lollipop is a guideline marker, which lets you drag these into your documents and get your vertical guide marks. This is handy in a language like COBOL, where it’s useful to keep your columns straight.

The client software in QWIN makes use of standard Microsoft Windows tools such as a dockable tool bar and robust online help. The interface is very standard, which makes the learning curve short.

The “push/pop cursor” function was a disappointment to me, and I had to talk with tech support to understand how it worked – because it’s not documented under that name and can’t be found in the index. Basically it allows you to bookmark spots in your text file so that you can quickly jump to them. My problem with the function is that it’s a LIFO stack (last in, first out), so when you “push” cursor locations onto the stack and then “pop” them back, it goes in reverse order, so I didn’t have any way to go to a specific cursor location. Also, once you “pop” a cursor, it’s gone from the stack. So this feature only allowed me to get back to a cursor location once – otherwise I had to keep “pushing” the cursor every time I popped back.

An area where QWIN shines is its ability to search for and replace text. You can do things such as look for only whole words, so if you are searching for “USER,” it won’t pull up “USERNAME” unless you want it to. QWIN also has the ability to search for a matching pattern as opposed to a literal string. That means I can search on @shawn@gordon@ and find any occurrence of the string “shawn” followed by zero or more intervening characters and then the string “gordon.” You are provided the following match pattern criteria:

@ matches zero or more characters of any type
# matches exactly on numeric character (0-9)
? matches exactly one alphabetic character (a-z, A-Z)
~ matches zero or more space characters
& matches the next character (use &@ to look for an @)

Conclusions
Qedit for Windows is a very nice tool when considered on its own. In my opinion it feels like a few of its features might be a bit behind some of the other products I’ve seen in this arena, such as its ability to bookmark code. It is very, very fast, and lets you edit files from multiple sources (such as HP 9000s) as well as across the Internet. It gives you all the standard editing and search tools that you could want, although the “push cursor” feature needs to be severely enhanced.

This product is very reliable and well written. My main problem with it is that it has lost what made Qedit so great for so many people: the command line interface. I believe that to entice hardcore users of Qedit, Robelle should consider providing a pop up window to execute command line options. That way it would be there for programmers who want it, but it won’t clutter the nice interface job Robelle has done with QWIN.

If you’re an existing Qedit customer you’ll definitely want to check out QWIN, and once you do you’ll probably want to buy it. If you’re not yet using Qedit but looking for some nice HP 3000 editing solutions, especially those with client-server capabilities, I’d advise you to get a demo.