WinEdt 10.0.20160317

A powerful and versatile text editor for Windows

The WinEdt application was developed to be a powerful and versatile text editor for Windows, with a strong predisposition towards the creation of [La]TeX documents. DO NOT, however, mistake WinEdt itself for a TeX system!

WinEdt is used as a front-end for compilers and typesetting systems, such as TeX, HTML or NSIS. WinEdt's highlighting schemes can be customized for different modes and its spell checking functionality supports multi-lingual setups, with dictionaries (word-lists) for many languages. 

WinEdt's macro language has evolved gradually: as the need arose for actions beyond a predefined set of commands. As a consequence, it is a pretty non-standard language that implements loops and conditional statements with macro functions rather than keywords.

Sophisticated macro scripts involving loops and conditional statements are, admittedly, hard to write and read, and it may take some time to become familiar with it. However, WinEdt comes with almost 500 predefined macro functions that can be used to accomplish the most common tasks. Thus you do not have to be a macro language guru to create an interface that launches an external application.

A simple macro item:

Run('Executable "Switches and Parameters"','Startup Folder');

will do in most cases.

WinEdt's Macros, Menus and Exec folders have all the macro scripts that are used in the default settings. Based on these examples it is possible to implement a custom action (that is not already covered) without in-depth knowledge of WinEdt's macro language. 

Macro Recorder can be used as a starting point; it can record a sequence of actions that can be repeated as a group or else extracted to a file and edited in order to implement actions that go beyond a simple record and play...

This Macro Manual describes all WinEdt Macro Functions. Elements, Rules and Syntax of the Macro language are described in depth. Different techniques to write conditional statements and iterate through strings and tasks are illustrated with concrete examples.

Almost 600 available macro functions are organized in sections according to their purpose (eg. Application Launching Macros, Iteration Macros, Conditional Macros, etc...). All macro functions are also indexed for quick reference.

The mode-sensitive Help command, Keyword Search (Ctrl+F1), uses this Macro Help if evoked while editing a macro script. The same command will start LaTeX's Help when executed within a TeX document.