WinEdt's overall appearance depends on your Windows and selected Themes, and on the way you want to customize WinEdt's own colors and background schemes. Below are a few examples of WinEdt 5.4 on Windows XP (Silver Theme)...
WinEdt in Action as an HTML Editor on Windows Vista : Editing and navigating among hundreds of HTML topic files for its help (Tree Control and Navigation Bar capabilities are essential to manage projects like this).
In WinEdt's Colors and Syntax Highlighting Dialog you can make a few preferences pertaining to different background colors and schemes that are being used in the above example. The Help in the dialog explains (or) gives the details...
Notice auto-delimiter matching in action. Line Numbers have been displayed for visual feedback (in the default settings the shortcut Ctrl+= toggles the visibility of the line numbers)...
WinEdt can be customized to run with different utilities and is particularly suitable for writing TeX documents. WinEdt allows the user to install Console and Windows Applications and activate them by using a Menu Command or a Tool Bar Button. Furthermore, WinEdt can pass currently opened files as parameters, making sure that changes are automatically saved before the files are compiled. After defining utilities (such as TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX, YAP), most of the common tasks associated with writing a TeX document or a project are reduced to clicking a Tool Bar Button or selecting a Menu Command. Using a simple but efficient strategy to manage projects, WinEdt is suitable for writing papers, theses or books.
WinEdt is designed as a flexible GUI (Graphical User Interface) oriented shell and editor that performs all the routine tasks related to compiling, previewing and spell-checking ([La]TeX) documents, thus allowing the author to focus on their contents. Do not, however, mistake WinEdt for a TeX system: WinEdt is an ASCII (not UNICODE) editor with the ability to launch external applications and compilers!
WinEdt's default settings and appearance:
Default settings provide an interface to MiKTeX and HTML Help Compiler. Options -> Configurations Menu contains alternative configurations (including fpTeX/TeX Live)...
WinEdt provides a special GUI Page Control containing almost 500 buttons associated with TeX symbols. You can make this control Visible by checking the "Show GUI Page Control" Option in the Context Menu belonging to the Menu/ Tool Bar Control. The control and its contents are user customizable. WinEdt's on-line Help will guide you through the customization, should you decide to embark on it.
Context popup menus provide additional functionality, as well as less frequently used options. Most Dialogs and Controls respond to a right mouse button click by calling their popup context menu.
WinEdt is extremely customizable. You can completely redefine the Menu contents and default shortcuts, change the colors of its controls, rearrange the Tool Bar buttons, modify the highlighting schemes, etc. Here is a sample of an alternative setup (HTML Configuration):
The example below briefly illustrates WinEdt's spell-checking ability:
The commands Check Word (Shift+Enter) and Complete Word (Ctrl+Enter) in the Tools menu are real life-savers. Note that misspelled words are (by default) highlighted in red and underlined. This auto-spelling functionality can be turned off by clicking on the Spell panel in the status line. The same applies to other panels in the status line: they respond to mouse clicks!
In particular, WinEdt supports standard (LINE) mode copy, cut and paste operations as well as Block (Column) selection mode. This can come in handy if you want to manipulate columns of data: selection mode can be toggled by clicking on the LINE panel in the status line. Note that choosing the Block Mode selection temporarily disables auto-wrapping and enables the "free caret interface". After you are finished with the Block Selection Mode you should restore the default behavior (click on the Block Panel to restore the "standard" LINE selection mode).
