This has been out in the wild for a few weeks, and I plan to maintain it for a few more months at least :P, so I won't wait for NANY 2023 to announce it here:
groffstudio is the least bad (and only) IDE for
GNU troff, a free implementation of the standard POSIX typesetting system (see
Wikipedia et al.).
Website (which is very beautiful as well)
While one could debate whether Linux, BSD and UNIX users would even need this (they usually use
make or
Mk for that), using
groff on Windows is not quite as trivial: First you'll need to find and install
groff with all required dependencies, then you'll need to learn how to use it on the command line without having access to the manual, because
man does not exist on Windows.
groffstudio has a button to download
groff right from my servers - just unpack it somewhere in your
%PATH% and you're good to go. (It will check whether it's there.)
Features:- Has a large button to generate .ps or .pdf files.
- Can help you install groff on Windows.
- Has built-in update checks (optional, off by default).
- Open Source, licensed under the terms of the CDDL-1.1 license.
(That still does not invalidate my copyright.) - Written in Free Pascal, using the LCL widget set, to make portability easier.
Precompiled binaries for Windows and macOS exist, contributions are welcome.
Non-features:- Support for other troff implementations, like neatroff and Heirloom troff.
Maintaining a GUI for one troff which has a relatively reliable set of installed features is hard enough. - A preview mode, as known from LaTeX editors like TeXstudio.
Previewing requires compilation. Just compile. :D - A formatting toolbar.
As groff has a standard set of formatting commands, but all of its macro packages (and some preprocessors) come with their own set of additional commands, that would be either not helpful or awkward.
Enjoy or whatever.