				Gate
			A text-gatherer for Unix
			      Version 2.06
			       Jan Wolter

Introduction
============

Gate is text-gatherer. A text-gatherer is like a text-editor, but much
more lightweight and unobtrusive.

If you have a program or shell script that asks people to enter a small
chunk of text, a text-gatherer like Gate is a good way to do it. It
doesn't clear the screen (annoying if there were just some instructions
printed there). It doesn't require you to know a lot of obscure editing
commands. It doesn't make excessive demands on the intelligence of your
terminal emulation software.

It does provide a number of features that make it easier for novice
users to produce good text. It does word-wrap, prints a prompt on each
new line, and allows backspacing from the currently line onto previous
lines. It also provides features that a more experienced user can use. You
can call up normal editor, or use some of gate's simple-minded editing
commands. You can read in files, or save your text to a file. You can
filter your text through something like the unix "fmt" command. It
provides a nice spell-checking interface too.

Some of what it does is pretty obscure - If you print a prompt on each
line, and the text being entered is meant to be printed without a prompt,
or with a different number of characters prefixed to each line, there
is a very good risk that all your tabs will be messed up. Gate fixes
things so tabs during input act just like they will on output.

It is quite configurable, and decently portable among Unix systems.

I am not currently doing active development on gate, but bug-fix release
still occasionally happen.  Basically, the era where novice-friendliness
was sought in command-line interfaces is past.  Novices are mostly provided
with GUI's these days.  So the motivation for further improvements (like
making arrow keys work) is lacking.

History
=======

Gate is something of a dinosaur.

Gate was designed in the 1980s to be used with the Picospan or Yapp
conferencing systems, and many parts of the design were optimized for this
use. (It sort of works with Caucus too.) It is heavily used on M-Net and
Grex, mostly by people who don't know they are running it (the natural
reward for unobtrusiveness). There is a similar program, named "red"
that was written for use with Picospan on the Well. I've never seen it,
but I believe gate does everything red does and quite a bit more. It
has been used in non-conferencing applications, but not all that much.

More recently, gate has been used with Fronttalk, an open source,
client-server clone of Picospan.

The name "gate" is an abbreviation of "GAther TExt."

Installation
============

Unpack the distribution.  Inside the distribution directory do

   ./configure

The following options are interesting:

   Spell checkers:

        IF NONE OF THESE OPTIONS ARE GIVEN, GATE WILL NOT SPELL CHECK.

        --with-aspell      Gnu aspell version 0.50 or later
        --with-oldaspell   older versions of Gnu aspell
        --with-ispell      Gnu international ispell version 3.x
        --with-gispell     Gnu ispell version 4.x (obsoleted by 3.x)
        --with-oldspell    Unix 'spell' command (with + command-line option)
        --with-olderspell  Unix 'spell' command (without + command-line option)

        If the programs are not installed in your path, then you'll have to
        do --with-foospell=/the/full/path/name .

    Compatibility:

        --with-picospan    Picospan compatible [default].
        --with-yapp        Yapp compatible.

    Default editor:

        --with-editor=<path>  Editor to use for users with no EDITOR env
			      variable.  Default is 'vi'.

    Paths:

	--prefix=<path>     Install directory.  Default /usr/local.

To compile, do

    make

To install the program, the help file and the man page do

    make install
