In this column we will be introducing software developed for the ACKNEX engine by others than ourselves. As always we are grateful for any kind of tip and will gladly give any program a closer look, whether it is an editor, like the one described further down, or a new graphics tool or a programming tool.
  To cut a long story short: the ACKNEX editor is not meant for professionals who feel quite at home with the commands. Everybody with enough experience will prefer to use a professional windows editor like MEW with a default for highlighting syntax.You usually are faster using the keyboard instead of the mouse.

But things are different for beginners or slow typers. Those who are unnerved because they continually have to reach for the reference guide, checking in which syntax an offset has to be set of a region, will hail the advent of pulldown menues for regions in the ACKNEX editor. They not only will never again be tempted to mis-spell a keyword or drop a semicolon, they are also given an overview of the many possible keywords that may be contained in a main defintion.
 

The editor is installed with a setup.exe. During installation you may specify a directory. To start the editor you only have to double-click the icon - which you'd best put on the desktop. It's also sensible to link WDL files to the editor and leave them on the desktop as sessions. After starting the editor you are presented with a quite nice and well structured face. Concerning new WDL files there are also a few nice features for professional users: instead of writing over existing wdl files the editor offers a possibility to install with a few mouse clicks the usual head-information: Mapfile, resolution, color ranges etc. are set via pull down menues.

Now things are really starting to get interesting for beginners. Most possible definitions have their own icons in the menue. If you click on "insert bitmap", a pulldown with predefined syntax appears - including pointed brackets for the filenames and complete with proper commas and semicolons. No way can a rookie go astray here. Clicking OK properly transfers the settings from the editor window to the virgin WDL file. The screenshot shows the editor with opened menue for regions, skills and the editing window. The author very much strives to remain up-to-date, catching all the new features of every new release. Which almost turns the editor into a small reference book.

The usual features of an editor, like search/replace, line numbers and - starting with the latest release - even syntax highlighting are there as well. So it's quite a useful tool at a reasonable price. You can download a demo from Greg Reith's homepage. It contains all features but can't save files.