26 Mar
2007
26 Mar
'07
11:18 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Jim Leonard once stated:
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.
One editor I didn't see listed was PE, by IBM. It had #1, I'm not sure
about #2 though, but at 40k I wasn't going to complain (nor did I really
miss undo, although I never expected undo to begin with). It could also
edit files upto the available free memory in the system (I tried once on an
old MS-DOS based laptop---a document about 400k in size; it was doable, but
it took quite some time to load).
-spc (could edit multiple files, true block copy, and somewhat
programmable. I used verion 1.0 for *years* and only found
one (maybe two [2]) bug(s) [1])
[1] Lines *had* to end with CRLF, otherwise wierd things would
happen.
[2] The longest line could only be 255 characters in length (which
is why this is maybe a bug). Longer lines would be truncated,
but it would say it was truncating.