Ye olde Minimum Profit

Minimum Profit (MP) is a very nice CLI (console) text editor. It also has an optional GTK2 interface, however I prefer the CLI version.

For the CLI version, the two nicest features are the popup menu, and syntax highlighting, in a very small executable -- it is about 180KB, with syntax highlighting builtin.

It is far superior to other CLI editors, in terms of ease-of-use. The full VI might have more features, but barely so.
VIM with gtk2 interface is definitely far more powerful and easy to use, but also enormous.

For sometime, I have been using version 3.2.13 in Quirky, also in earlier pups. The latest is 5.2.10, however I prefer the 3.x series as it is simpler. 5.x has a scripting language, which I don't need.

I compiled 3.2.13 in OpenEmbedded, however, found that the menu is broken. CTRL-A pops up the menu, but the keyboard refuses to navigate it.
So, compiled 5.2.10, menu now works. However, the keyboard is not right -- end and home keys don't do what they should, although the docs state the default behaviour is to move to end or beginning of a line.

The 5.x series has a different runtime configuration setup. 3.x uses /etc/mprc and ~/.mprc, and as I recall, forum member 'Bruse B' fixed the key assignments so they worked right in Puppy.

The author of MP has abandoned the 3.x series, but I hunted far and wide using google, and found a couple of later versions in the 3.x series.

I have compiled 3.3.17 in Pyro64 0.2, and everything works. Menu works great.

Coz these old versions of MP have just about disappeared from the web, I have uploaded them here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/sources/alphabetical/m/

Tags: linux