INTRODUCTION - starting out with FRED.

FRED is an interactive text editor language available under TSS on GCOS8. It was written at the University of Waterloo by P.J.Fraser. While FRED was originally based on Bell Laboratories' well-known text editor QED, it now differs from QED in many important ways. Thus FRED should not be thought of as merely a version of QED, but as a descendant that has gone off in directions of its own.

FRED lends itself to a great diversity of applications and thus appeals to a wide variety of users. People who are unfamiliar with computers and computing practice can quickly learn enough of the language to input text, edit it, and write it out. More experienced users can use FRED to write sophisticated text manipulation programs that go far beyond simple editing.

The manual contains all the information you need when you work with FRED. Because of the technical nature of this document, people with little computing experience are strongly recommended to read the FRED Tutorial Guide before plunging into the manual itself. A more advanced tutorial dealing with writing FRED buffer programs is also available. Lastly, there is a FRED summary sheet created for use as a quick reference.