OS/2 is delivered with two editors. The "System Editor" is a bare-bones, plain-vanilla, garden-variety text editor which ain't pretty but gets the job done. The other choice is the "Enhanced Editor", which I hadn't looked much at.

Jerry Cuomo works at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and he talked about the Enhanced Editor here. It turns out that the Enhanced Editor is something of a garage project; it started as a rather plain text editor, but has fallen prey to "creeping featurism". It is still treated as a research project, and there is no clear direction in which the product is moving.

EPM (the program name for the Enhanced Editor) supports some of OS/2's desktop drag-and-drop metaphor. You can grab a file with the mouse, drag it over and drop it on EPM; EPM opens a window on the file. In fact, you can drop several files on EPM simultaneously, and it will open that many windows (it's easy to switch from editing one file to another).

You can change the colors or fonts associated with parts of a text file that you are editing. One of the unique things about EPM is that the extra information that has to be stored to support fonts and colors is not saved in the file itself; it is saved in OS/2's "extended attribute" area, which is associated with the file's directory entry. If you were suitably inclined, you could change all the DEVICE= statements in your CONFIG.SYS to an Old English font, and save the file. If you used TYPE or LIST or any other utility to look at your CONFIG.SYS, all you would see is the original text. If you used EPM to display or print the file, you would get the Old English font.

You can open up an editor window, execute the OS/2 command shell, and capture any command results for editing.

EPM has a really neat "undo/redo" facility. You can use scroll bars to scroll back and forth through time when doing extensive editing. You have to see this one to appreciate it.

EPM is "spellcheck enabled", but OS/2 didn't deliver a dictionary with it. (Actually, a new version of EPM has come out since SHARE with a dictionary and other enhancements.)

Other enhancements running in the labs and just coming out: EPM has an unspecified macro language which lets you run EPM programs, something like EMACS or maybe ISPF.