Although WinEdt can be used for any text editing purposes, it’s more oriented towards creating and compiling LaTeX files, which allows creating documents with a high typographic quality, as that needed for scientific publications. Moreover, the application can be used as an integrated development environment for some compilers and typesetting systems. In this regard, the tool supports such document types as ASCII, ANSI, Data, WinEdt, HTML, TeX, BibTeX, Metapost document, and NSIS script.
The program's interface is very straightforward as all of its features can be accessed from the menu. Probably because there’s no intention of making this editor popular among regular users, the program has a “serious” (unattractive) look, more likable by scientists and programmers. The editor is full of features and getting to know how to use all of them may certainly take some time. Fortunately, there’s a configuration wizard to help you adapt the tool to your specific needs. Additionally, there’s excellent accompanying documentation on how to use it; and not only that, you can get more help on specific topics at the program´s community site.
WinEdt has various built-in tools to help you write correctly. These include Thesaurus, spell checking and abbreviations. Although English is installed as the default language, it’s possible to download and install other dictionaries, which are also available at the community site. Besides, it comes with multiple features specifically intended for writing code, such as code folding, syntax highlighting, and automatic completion. Likewise, the editor supports various code standards, as Unicode and UTF8. It’s also good that the program allows recording macros as a way to automate repetitive tasks.
In general, WinEdt is a complete editor that can be integrated with a TeX system without problems. I wouldn’t recommend this application for general-purpose editing, even when it can be used for that. However, it can be a great help for code editing.
v10.3 [May 21, 2018]
- A few optimizations, improvements to the default settings, and minor bug fixes.
- WinEdt now provides an interface to MiKTeX Console (new in MiKTeX 2.9.6630). MiKTeX Console consolidates three different interfaces (MiKTeX Options, MiKTeX Update Wizard, and MiKTeX Package Manager which are now discontinued and have been removed from the default settings in WinEdt 10.3). If you rely on WinEdt's Interfaces tomaintain your MiKTeX installation it is recommended that you update your MiKTeX before installing WinEdt 10.3!
- On some shared network drives (UNC or mapped) asking for the existence of a single file can take 10 msec. and this makes WinEdt very unresponsive while it is checking if certain files (e.g. %N.pdf, etc.) exist in order to enable or disable menu items and toolbar buttons that depend on their existence. For optimal performance on such drives it is best to exclude them from this functionality by following the instructions in the Help for Preferences Dialog| File Status. However, WinEdt now detects situations like this and automatically reduces the frequency of "file existence queries" in order to improve its performance and responsiveness when working on projects located on slow network drives. In most cases WinEdt's performance will be reasonably good without making changes in the File Status detection (Preferences Dialog).
- Improved handling of situations when many opened files are modified or moved by an external application which could previously result in too many repeated warning messages issued by WinEdt. It is now possible to close all non-existent documents in response to a single prompt. The problem with numerous externally moved files was particularly bad for a few users that used UpdateDoc macro in Activate Document Event Handler! This macro now ignores non-existent documents in order to avoid a flood of messages about non-existent files every time you switch to another document. These improvements will be noticed by (advanced) users that use git (or similar).
- An oddity with some status line panels not being refreshed after reloading StatusBar.ini (or after resizing some panels) has been addressed. This mostly affected a few users that added extra panels or customized Status Line. Furthermore, SetPanel*(); macros now no longer require a call to UpdateStatus as they instantly update the modified panel.
- Command line switches -D and -d now produce global or local debug log file respectively. Previously only global log (%B\WinEdt.run) was supported and for most users this only worked when running WinEdt with elevated privileges. Switch -d produces a local log (%b\WinEdt.run) which is more useful as it does not require extra privileges.
- Filter Set specification now contains two new 0/1 properties BALANCED and NEGATED. They can be used to fix a minor oddity (imperfection) when it comes to highlighting of TeX commands proceeded by line breaks (\). They are also used to improve highlighting in WinEdt's macro scripts where it is now easier to catch improperly specified registers inside nested strings.
- WinEdt now allows PDF (forward) Search (with Sumatra) with .synctex and .synctex.gz. This makes it possible to work with Context and arara without changing the SyncTeX extension in the Execution Modes when changing the compiler. Few users (perhaps only one:-)) will notice this change.
- FormatString macro now allows extra parameters in order to produce aligned strings (left, right, and center) to the specified length with leading and/or trailing spaces as necessary. Help explains.
- WinEdt now checks parameters that contain %variables in configuration files while they are being loaded. This prevents serious problems that resulted when such parameters were loaded without any checking, only to detect the syntax errors inside them later when they are being used. For example, errors in REQ_FILTER value in the menu could result in serious problems that are not easy to fix (if a user made a mistake when specifying them). The same applies to CAPTION is status line, tree, and other items used inside frequent event handlers.
- A bug with (a seldom used) Full Width Selection AND Uniscribe Engine has been fixed. It now works as intended regardless of Uniscribe engine being enabled or not.
- Improvements to custom TeXify macros.
- Help has been updated with a few examples (e.g. how to insert multiple citations, etc.) to make functionality that is not obvious and easy to discover accessible to more users.
- WinEdt now recognizes \frametitle directive when collecting beamer frames in TOC (Tree or Gather) interface.
- Ins, InsText, InsChr, and InsChar macro functions now have an extra optional parameter. When non-zero the inserted text is highlighted in the specified selection mode (0..15). Helpexplains.
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