On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Julian Richardson wrote:
> When I
typed "system disk" I meant one
> with an appropriate collection of utilities, which with code bloat
> can be hard to fit on a 720k disk -- since "edit" needs "?basic"
etc.
Get the GNU DOS port of vi - has the benefit of being a standard, very
powerful, reliable and takes up 120KB or so (OK, that's a lot more than
ideal for an editor, but at least you don't need all the extra garbage
that you have to have with standard MS-DOS 'edit') - of course, if
you've never used vi before, you're gonna hate it :)
I've got what I think is an even better DOS version of vi. Since it was
made in 1989 its almost on topic.
The cool thing about this is that its only 44K. It's fast. And it takes
advantage of the IBM keyboard, allowing you to use the arrow keys and the
cursor control keys (home, end, pgup, pgdn), plus delete and insert.
Insert maps to 'i', delete maps to 'x'. And when you use these special
keys (arrows, insert, delete) it automatically puts you back in 'escape'
mode so you don't have to manually press escape to exit from insert mode.
I'll e-mail it to anyone who wants it. I've been using it since the early
90s and make it part of my standard install on my DOS machines.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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