See How vEdit is Used

No Ordinary Editor. A Multipurpose Tool.

Not just an ordinary text editor, vEdit and its powerful macro language let you perform simple to complex editing, sorting, conversion and other tasks quickly and easily. Check out how real-world customers have used it in their work.

Spreadsheet Data ImportReducing a huge data set for import to Excel

We make silicon wafers and measure the energy used to grow an ignot. Our commercial software program assumes the measurements will (MUST) be exported to Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The first time we tried measuring, we saved 149000 readings. This is far too many "rows" for a spreadsheet. A database program can handle 149000 records but would not import the measurement file format.

So I made a vEdit macro to search the measurement data file (15 MByte) for a string. When found then that line is copied to a new file. The new file has only 3000 readings or "rows". Microsoft Excel can import a 3000 line file OK.

EBCDIC to ASCII Data Validation and Conversion

I am a programmer/analyst. My job functions range from programming to analysis to data conversions. I use YOUR product every day at work and at home when I need a quality text editor. The editor has been a real help with the data conversions. I would say indispensable. It would be unpleasant to imagine doing a conversion without having the editor available. It is easy to see if the fields are really where someone else said that they should be and it is so much easier to do ebcdic-ascii conversions. After performing a conversion I sometimes see data that appears inconsistent and it is easy with your editor to go back to the original file and check it out!

Markup Tag Validation

I use vEdit for text editing of large files (up to 25 MB) of text tagged similarly to SGML files. vEdit is particularly useful and speedy for search-and-replace operations. I've also written a simple macro to check tagging integrity (e.g., for an opening <se> tag is there a matching </se> closing tag before the next opening tag?). I'm now using vEdit with Microsoft Word and pasting text between the two--very handy.

EDI Electronic Data Interchange

I do EDI processing and often have the need to look at and edit ASCII files. Most editors are difficult to use and have file size limits, not to mention lack the ability to display in different modes (especially where whitespace chars are concerned e.g. CRLF or newlines). I found the Hex, Octal etc viewer very handy for troubleshooting the files that are sent FTP to me.

File EditingMainframe JCL, Windows Help, EBCDIC and More

vEdit is primarily used by me to make changes to large ASCII data files. The other primary use is making modifications to software files. My primary uses of vEdit are (in order of use):

  • Writing documentation, memos (like this one), etc.
  • Editing programs (mostly COBOL, some C, REXX, etc).
  • Writing specialized text that is then imported into other products/environments. For example: mainframe JCL; Windows HELP files; text that is then imported into Microsoft WORD; etc.
  • Editing EBCDIC files downloaded from mainframe (used in MicroFocus COBOL Workbench)
  • Specialized activities: We use vEdit macros to implement a "Help Desk." The macros allow doing text searches against already-reported problems, establishing new problem reports, etc.

COBOL ProgramsView and cleaning up huge mainframe files

I use vEdit to create and maintain COBOL programs that run on PCs. Some of the files I have to deal with are in the 100-200MB range and it is nice to be able to browse them. Also, since I work with EDI, I get some weird looking files that I can untangle with vEdit.

Database FilesGetting rid of nasty characters

I originally started using vEdit many years ago for jobs that no other editor would handle. Like getting rid of hex 00 in text files which were used as input to a DBMS which barfed on that character. Over the years, your program has 'saved my bacon' many times, allowing me to do things with disks and data that so-called experts said couldn't be done. Many times IBM mainframers would have me download data for manipulation to my little PC to do things with vEdit that their multi-million dollar systems couldn't do on a bet.

Mixed ASCII & Packed BCD

Our primary use here is for editing files which have a mix of ASCII and packed BCD in them. The fact that I can get into a HEX mode and examine or modify the file is the most important feature of the program for us.

Column Operations On Data Files

The most common use that I have for VEDIT is columnar operations on data files. This, of course, is nothing fancy, but the columnar block features are invaluable to my work.

Microsoft Visual StudioComplex Editing Across Many Files

Most text editing I do is C++ code using Microsoft Visual C++ Developer Studio. I sometimes use vEdit instead because it has better search and macro capability. ... The features I need most is the ability to paste dozens of text blocks between several files, multiple file replacements (remove all tabs in all files and stop after each replacement in visual mode) some but not excessive macros for special tasks and the possibility to edit large (several hundred megabytes) of test output.

Processing Many File Types Graphics, Postscript, Executable & Database

I don't know what I'd do without [vEdit]. It's unique! I've edited files of all kinds with it, including graphics, postscript, DOS/Unix/Windows executables, database. I process files with widely varied formats from our customers on a regular basis. I used to write processing programs in C and Pascal for this purpose, but, not anymore! This was the only reason I had a development system on Unix. vEdit helps me run my business.

DBMS File Preparation And Editing of Mainframe Data Files

I originally started using VEDIT many years ago for jobs that no other editor would handle. Like getting rid of hex 00 in text files which were used as input to a DBMS which barfed on that character. Over the years, your program has 'saved my bacon' many times, allowing me to do things with disks and data that so-called experts said couldn't be done. Many times IBM mainframers would have me download data for manipulation to my little PC to do things with VEDIT that their multi-million dollar systems couldn't do on a bet.

Column Editing, Data File Prep and Text Manipulation with Macros and RegEx Search/Replace

I'm really spoiled. There is nothing like VEDIT anywhere for column pasting and data file manipulation. I replaced a difficult-to-maintain 40,000 line text conversion program written in C with a 900 line VEDIT macro that I wrote and maintain myself. Best of all, the VEDIT macro is faster. Actually about a 3000 line C program which did extensive text manipulation was reduced to a 300 line VEDIT macro -- a 10-to-1 reduction in source file length. What really worked well for us was the extensive built-in functions especially the regular expression search/replace in VEDIT which would have taken us months to write. And yes, the VEDIT macro actually runs faster, I think because you have much more optimized routines (regular expressions etc) than what we had written in C.