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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.
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