In late 1998, I was so enthusiastic about Perl that I wrote a text editor in it. As I said then:

aced is a curses-based text editor written completely in perl. It is 8-bit clean and has multi-buffer support and user-configurable key bindings. As a demonstration of its configurability, it includes emacs, vi and pico(tm) lookalike modes. It's currently quite experimental, however.

Although aced is usable, most people would probably rather use one of the more traditional editors. It isn't really as powerful as many editors, and it certainly isn't an example of excellent programming technique. However, if you are a Perl freak, you might enjoy the novelty of using an editor written in Perl.

The final release of aced is available for download as a gzipped tar file: aced.19981223.tar.gz. To use it, you'll need Perl 5 with the Curses.pm module installed. Note that this release has at least one bug: if a line number is specified on the command line, as in "aced +5 foo" to begin with the cursor on the fifth line of foo, aced will jump to the wrong line. To fix this, the code "$startline=$1;" must be altered to read "$startline=$1-1;".

The three previous releases of aced are also available for download: aced.19981209.tar.gz, aced.19981212.tar.gz, aced.19981216.tar.gz. The changelog, included in the tarballs, is also available for online viewing. If you want aced, you probably want the 1998-12-23 release rather than one of the older releases.

I did do a bit more work on aced in the early months of 1999. In particular, I began to add "stackable modes", which are a bit like Emacs major/minor modes. I never finished these changes, though. As of 2002, I don't intend to do any further development of aced.