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LEXX is a text editor which was possibly the first to use live parsing and colour syntax highlighting. It was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM around 1985. The name was chosen because he wrote it as a tool for lexicographers, during an assignment for Oxford University Press's second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The program ran (and still, 2012, runs) on mainframes under VM/CMS. LEXX's design was chosen as a middle ground between specialized syntax directed editors such as Grif and JANUS and general purpose editors such as the contemporary Emacs and XEDIT.
LEXX uses dynamically-loaded parsers which assign classes of elements (tokens formed from character strings) to fonts and colors. It allows indention to be used to format and show the structure of the file being edited, and other formatting options allow (for example) the hiding of selected classes of text, such as tags. A collection of screenshots is available.
LPEX ('Live Parsing Editor"), a reimplemented derivative of the LEXX concept were originally produced for OS/2 and AIX, but now also run on Windows, Linux, and the Java JVM.