The release cycle for e is pretty fast, with new updates coming out every one or two weeks. All updates are announced on the forum, but if you are not a regular there, it can still be hard to keep track.
To help on this situation, user Charles Roper has made an rss feed tracking the e updates:
http://feed43.com/e-texteditor-releases.xml
Add it to your feed reader and you will get automatically notified when new updates are released.
The latest updates of e has added support for remote projects. This means that you can open an ftp site directly in the project pane and use it as if it was a local project.
In earlier versions of e, this could also be approximated with various shell plug-ins, but having it as an integrated part of e removes the reliance on external tools and gives a much nicer user experience. Implementing this features was also an opportunity to re-architect and improve a part of e that had gone a bit stale while the rest of the editor had evolved. The new underlying project framework is very flexible and extensible, and will allow for a lot of new capabilities in the near future.
To open a remote project just select ‘File/Open Remote Folder’ on the menu, create a new profile and press ‘Open’. The remote site will be opened in the project pane, and you can interact with it as if it was a local project.
You can also open remote files and projects directly from the command line. You just have to give it the path i url format:
e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/file.txt
e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (remember trailing slash for projects)
e.exe ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (with login)
The remote projects feature is still very new and currently only supports the ftp, but support for protocols like sftp and webdav will be available soon.
After a long beta period, e is finally coming out of beta. It has been quite a ride. We have had a pretty crazy release cycle with updates coming out weekly (and often twice a week). So I really appreciate all the users who have followed the releases and pushed both me and e to improve with their enthusiasm. Special appreciation goes to all those users who chose to register even though it was still in beta.
Coming out of beta does not mean that development will slow down. The 1.0 release is a stable base to build on and I have a lot of new (and unique) features in the pipeline. I will probably start having a bit longer between releases to focus on some larger features.
And before I get drowned in requests again. Yes, a linux version is in the works 
Since the latest update of wxCocoaDialog, it has been possible to use it for making custom html dialogs. This gives you a lot more freedom when creating bundle commands as you can now use far richer and more responsive dialogs in your interaction with the user.
As an example of what is possible, and how easy it is to create interactive dialogs, I have created a bundle command version of the excellent Visibone Color Lab.
The modifications to the original html code is really minor. Mainly just moving some frames around and making it update on mouseOver. The interesting part comes where i modify it to return the color code when a color is clicked:
<area HREF=”cocoadialog://%23FFFFFF” onMouseOver=”pick(’FFFFFF’,'W’,'White’)” SHAPE=”POLYGON” COORDS=”184,200,202,168,221,200″>
By giving it a link with the protocol defined as “cocoadialog”, I instruct it to react on a click by closing the dialog and returning the links content (notice the url encoding for the # mark).
To make this into a bundle command, I just have to open the Bundle Editor and create a new command containing the following two lines:
cd "$TM_SUPPORT_PATH/Visibone"
CocoaDialog html --title "The 216-Color Webmaster's Palette" --html-from-file big.html --width 380 --height 542
By first setting the current working dir to the location of the html files (and images), I ensure that the dialog can find all it’s files.
I then set input to “None” and output to “Replace Selected Text”, so that the color code will be inserted in the text when a user clicks a color.
I hope that this has illustrated how easy it is to make html dialogs. Since you have full access to using javascript in your html, there is really no limit to how freeform and interactive you can make it.
Thanks to the kind permission of Bob Stein, the Visibone creator, I have been able to include the color lab in the latest update of e. You can find it as “Insert websafe color” in the HTML bundle.
Many people think that learning to use Regular Expressions is difficult, but if you stick to the basics it is actually quite easy. This screencast and cheatsheet will give you a gentle introduction and allow you to gradually expand your knowledge into advanced usage.
Nothing can improve your ability to manipulate text as much as learning Regular Expressions, and it is not just in your editor. Just about any modern programming language support them, so you can greatly enhance your productivity and understanding of code by learning them.
The following screencast gives an introduction to the basics of regular expressions and shows how you can use them in your editor. The best way to learn is just playing around with them and watching the interactive feedback.
I have included a cheatsheet that you can use as a quick reference, and to expand your knowledge of Regular Expressions. I recommend that you print it out and gradually expand your comfort zone by trying out more and more features.
Ben Kittrell has written a straightforward how-to guide on creating the ideal Windows environment for Ruby on Rails development:
A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows
Transpose is a versatile command that can save you a lot of typing. What it does is to ‘reverse the order of things’, but what makes it really useful is the fact that what it reverses depends on the context:
If the caret is inside a word, the chars on each side of the caret are swapped, and the caret is moved to after the right char. This makes for a quick way to fix typing mistakes.
If the caret is between two words, the words are swapped.
If the caret is at the beginning of a line, the line is swapped with the line above. Similarly if the caret is at the end of a line, the line is swapped with the line below. This makes for an easy way to move lines up and down through the document.
If there is a selection, the contents is reversed.
If there are multible selections (made by holding down ctrl while selecting), the selections are swapped.
If there is a column selection (made by holding down alt while selecting), the order of items in the entire column is reversed.
You can access it from the menu, but to really make it a timesaver, I would recommend making it a habit to use it’s shortcut Ctrl-T.
e finally has a new website! The old one was getting a bit long in the hair and didn’t really reflect the current focus (the TextMate support was only mentioned in a small note in the sidebar).
Some users have noticed that the new site was lacking any reference to the collaboration features. I still have a lot of plans for the collaboration and revision control features. But at right at this stage it was diverting from the current focus on TextMate compatability. I early had the realization that no matter how powerful I made the rcs features, they would never really get used if the basic editing features weren’t up to scratch. So the main focus now is to get the TextMate compatibility complete and stable.
I will actually be removing the collaboration features for a time. They will come back in a much more powerful version when the TextMate features are stable.
When the first beta’s of e was released, it had a 30 day trial period, after which you had to buy a license to keep using the program. This was primarily based on experiences with other projects, where the transition from free to for-pay had resulted in a backslash from the user community.
This was a fine strategy when e was supposed to be simple editor, tightly focused on collaboration, which would be quickly out of beta. But the introduction of TextMate bundle support largely increased the scope and ability of the program, and greatly extended the beta period.
Based on thoughtful feedback from many users (many of whom had bought their own licenses), I have decided to make it possible to keep using the program beyond the trial period. This will stay possible for as long as the program is in beta state.
When you register e, the license is bound to you, and not to one specific computer. This means that you can use you license on as many computers as you like. There is also no limit on platforms, so it will also be valid on future versions for Linux or any other OS.
The license is valid for one year (time in beta does not count). After that minor updates are free but there will be an upgrade fee for major updates (2.0).
There is no greater encouragement than when users show that they like the program enough to buy it. So to show how much I appreciate those who do register while it is still in beta, all licenses being bought during the beta period will be extended to include the next major update + one more year of free updates.
The origin of the e text editor, comes from a project to create a next generation revision control system. The aim was to create an rcs, that could be deeply embedded into applications. This could give them all kinds of capabilities, which would otherwise be impossible. To have a real base to work from, I had to make an example application to embed it in. The choice of a text editor was obvious, since text currently is the main target for revision control. So after a lot of development, i had a very powerful and versatile revision control engine and a very basic text editor build on top of it.
The editor showed the potential of the underlying engine (like total crash survivability and undo as powerful as a fine-grained rcs), but it was still really to basic to be used for day-to-day work.
Enter Textmate
In the mean time Textmate had emerged as the new baseline for what a text editor should be capable of. It was the first editor since vi and emacs to introduce a radical improvement in interaction and usability. Only available on MacOS X, it’s modern interface had raised users expectations.
To get an idea of what makes textmate so special I can recommend viewing the screencasts at http://macromates.com/screencasts
It was obvious to me that my editor had to live up to these new expectations and it seemed that my only options was to either reinvent or blatantly copy textmates features, neither of which seemed very honest or appealing to me.
Instead I choose a third option: compatibility and cooperation.
Cooperation vs Competition
I contacted Allan Odgaard, the creator of textmate, to set up a meeting. Luck had it that we were both from Denmark, so we could meet in person. When we actually meet, we were surprised to find out that we had both studied at the same place (but never met), and when I told him where i live (which is in a small village in the countryside), we discovered that not only did his parents have a summerhouse in the same village, but it is actually within walking distance of my place. What are the odds? It is really a small world!
Allan was very positive about the prospect of me making the editor compatible with textmate, and he had no problems with me using the textmate bundles. Having more people, on more platforms, to use and improve the bundles, could only make them even more powerful and comprehensive.
This release is still a very early beta. It supports all the basic bundle features like themes, language grammars, snippets & commands. There is still no projects or bundle editor and there are many small features missing, but all the underpinnings are in place so it will advance rapidly from here.
Obviously some bundle items contain mac specific commands, so they will gradually be ported or replaced with equivalents.
Currently e is only available for Windows. But since it is coded in wxWidgets, in a totally crossplatform manner, a Linux version is very possible if there is enough interest. Out of respect for Allan and his work I will not be making a Mac version.
The Future
I will keep working with Allan to ensure that e stays compatible with the textmate bundle system. He has a lot of really cool stuff lined up for version 2.0, so there is something to look forward to.
When the textmate compatibility is complete, I will return to the original goal. Using the power of the underlying revision control engine, to introduce features beyond what is seen in any other editor.
