26 Mar
2007
26 Mar
'07
3:57 a.m.
On Mar 26, 2007, at 2:04 AM, Jim Leonard wrote:
I spent the weekend obsessing over what the fastest
editor I could
find for a 4.77MHz 8088, DOS, CGA platform. The results, if anyone
is interested, are here: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/texteditors
No doubt I will get some scorn for knocking Brief and other
venerable editors, but the truth is I have very specific needs: 1.
Instant screen response to user input, and 2. a functional undo.
That's it, really, and I was surprised how many text editors did
not fit the bill.
Undo functionality was probably a major sticking point. I don't
remember many editors from those days having undo.
When I was developing DOS software at work (16MHz 80286 systems
were current) I used Xywrite as a programming editor until I switched
to Turbo Pascal (using just the editor, not the compiler, as I wasn't
writing in Pascal). Turbo Pascal's editor is very fast and compact.
My whole office (small company, four programmers) wound up using it.
I later found Freemacs, an odd but very nice emacs-like editor for
DOS. I still use it to this day under QEMU (a CPU emulator) to write
PALASM code.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL