SPF Lite
Which can be found at spflite.co.nr is a A Windows Editor for SPF Lovers.
SPF is an editor originally available only on IBM Mainframes and was one of those things I learnt in the Old days of COBOL Programming. Surely these days have passed and there all kinds of great editors out there ?
Well Yes and No.
COBOL and other programming languages often had a strong column wise format to them since mainframe files often contained fixed length records or Lines. At the time COBOL was popular line editors were also popular where editing took place one line at a time. SPF was an editor of it’s time and allows a range of actions on the text using both line and block commands, it shows the line number in the file and things such as search and replace can be limited to specific rows or columns.
If you are a competent keyboards user and want to edit data or programing files you may find SPF Lite both a productive and feature rich editor. There are somethings that are very simple in SPF Lite – which is an adaption for the Windows Operating system.
Some examples. Place a RR on one line number and RR on another following it and press enter – the block of lines will be repeated immediately after the second. Print screen functions write to the clipboard and multiple files are handled in tabs. It can monitor if files have been changed on disk, sort data, bookmarks, Macros, overlays, column wise shift, exclude lines containing, show lines containing, open a new file from the clipboard and much more.
The product is regularly enhanced and has programmable Keys and much more.
Check it out and make sure you pay George if you decide to use it.
Another example – Picture Strings, use in find change or exclude commands
| P’=’ Any character |
| P’^’ Any character that is not a blank |
| P’#’ Any numeric character, 0-9 |
| P’-‘ Any non-numeric character |
| P’.’ Any non displayable character |
| P’@’ Any alphabetic character, uppercase or lowercase |
| P'<‘ Any lowercase alphabetic character |
| P’>’ Any uppercase alphabetic character |
| P’$’ Any special character, neither alphabetic nor numeric. |
