26 Mar
2007
26 Mar
'07
2:04 a.m.
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.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
26 Mar
26 Mar
6:57 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
1:44 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
Undo functionality was probably a major sticking
point. I don't
remember many editors from those days having undo.
Ironically, it was speed that was a major sticking point. There were
about three editors out of everything I tested with the screen/input
response to satisfy me. I'm not talking about things that take actual
time, like search/replace etc., but regular things like scrolling or
pageup/down. I understand some of these have legacy terminal roots, but
80x25 is only 4000 bytes of memory, it shouldn't be rocket science to
update it in a timely fashion... unless your text is represented
internally significantly more complex than structures of strings I suppose.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
4:14 p.m.
On Mar 26, 2007, at 1:44 PM, Jim Leonard wrote:
For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS is the big
display update bottleneck. Some programs achieved very fast screen
updates by writing directly to the display memory. The venerable
list.com comes to mind.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Undo
functionality was probably a major sticking point. I don't
remember many editors from those days having undo.
Ironically, it was speed that was a major sticking point. There
were about three editors out of everything I tested with the screen/
input response to satisfy me. I'm not talking about things that
take actual time, like search/replace etc., but regular things like
scrolling or pageup/down. I understand some of these have legacy
terminal roots, but 80x25 is only 4000 bytes of memory, it
shouldn't be rocket science to update it in a timely fashion...
unless your text is represented internally significantly more
complex than structures of strings I suppose. 
27 Mar
27 Mar
1:59 a.m.
On 26 Mar 2007 at 16:14, Dave McGuire wrote:
For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS
is the big
display update bottleneck. Some programs achieved very fast screen
updates by writing directly to the display memory. The venerable
list.com comes to mind.
...which brings to mind Jim's comment on WordStar. IIRC, there were
two versions of WS for DOS. One that used normal terminal I/O and
one that used direct screen I/O. Of course, the display matters a
lot on a PC-XT; CGA can't be updated without snow nearly as quickly
as MDA/Herc.
I do have a WS 4.00 for MS-DOS, which I didn't see in your list.
It's the direct-write version.
Going from the sublime to the ridiculous...
You could always run Windows and Notepad. (Windows will run from a
floppy if configured that way). Note that I'm talking about 1985
Windows that runs on a PC with CGA/Herc/EGA. VGA hadn't been
invented yet.
Cheers,
Chuck
4:42 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
I do have a WS 4.00 for MS-DOS, which I didn't see
in your list.
It's the direct-write version.
While the 3.30 version isn't in the test suite available for download,
it too was the direct-write version (trying to select a display resulted
in a message saying that IBM DISPLAY was the only choice) so I did
indeed test a direct-write version. 5.0 also appeared to be direct-write.
Going from the sublime to the ridiculous...
You could always run Windows and Notepad. (Windows will run from a
floppy if configured that way). Note that I'm talking about 1985
Windows that runs on a PC with CGA/Herc/EGA. VGA hadn't been
invented yet.
Ridiculous indeed. If I was forced to run a graphical environment just
to write some text, I would rather it be Geoworks instead ;-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
11:51 a.m.
Rumor has it that Jim Leonard may have mentioned these words:
Or Multi-Vue on the CoCo... but honestly, I can't *stand* that either. It
was always too slow for me, but I'm an impatient sot. ;-)
Going from the
sublime to the ridiculous...
You could always run Windows and Notepad. (Windows will run from a
floppy if configured that way). Note that I'm talking about 1985 Windows
that runs on a PC with CGA/Herc/EGA. VGA hadn't been invented yet.
Ridiculous indeed. If I was forced to run a graphical environment just to
write some text, I would rather it be Geoworks instead ;-) and.... George Currie wrote:
Quite possible - altho I wrote my first line editor as well ("MerchWrite,"
not surprisingly... ;-) was written in Basic and only had very basic
functions (obviously no undo) it ported well between the Tandy computer
lines... but my "current" favorite editor (for the last decade) is Jove;
and altho it's old, there is a 32-bit port of it to Winders - and IIRC,
it's only about 128K. I _can_ get it smaller in Linux with different
compiler optimizations, but I've never tried to compile it on a M$ platform.
For a small editor, it's got the closest Emacs keybindings I've found, is
very configurable, fast & stable... Yes, it has undo. ;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
_??_ zmerch at 30below.com
(?||?) If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
_)(_ disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
On a more serious note, have you checked out the
Borland Editor
Toolbox? IIRC it let you roll an editor similar in features to their
Yep; full example editor is 170KB and has no undo, but maybe I missed a
source directive somewhere in building the example project. I'll take
another look at it. 
4:56 p.m.
Although it doesn't meet your personal specs,
did you know that Electric Pencil was available on PC?
6:52 p.m.
On 27 Mar 2007 at 13:56, Fred Cisin wrote:
Although it doesn't meet your personal specs,
did you know that Electric Pencil was available on PC?
I think I mentioned it off-list to Jim. Didn't EP eventually morph
into Lotus Ami Pro--or am I thinking of a different word-processing
package?
Cheers,
Chuck
10:06 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
Although it doesn't meet your personal specs,
did you know that Electric Pencil was available on PC?
I did, and I've always wanted to try it, but I couldn't find a copy
anywhere. Being that it has its roots on, what, Apple II? I would
imagine it would be very fast indeed.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
28 Mar
28 Mar
12:34 p.m.
Rumor has it that Jim Leonard may have mentioned these words:
Fred Cisin wrote:
I dunno about Apples, but there was a version for the TRS-80 Model I.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy...
zmerch at 30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"
Although it doesn't meet your personal specs,
did you know that Electric Pencil was available on PC?
I did, and I've always wanted to try it, but I couldn't find a copy
anywhere. Being that it has its roots on, what, Apple II? I would
imagine it would be very fast indeed.
12:40 p.m.
On 27 Mar 2007 at 21:06, Jim Leonard wrote:
I did, and I've always wanted to try it, but I
couldn't find a copy
anywhere. Being that it has its roots on, what, Apple II? I would
imagine it would be very fast indeed.
I thought EP was strictly an 8080-CP/M product. It wouldn't surprise
me if a 6502 version was eventually produced, but the only versions
I've ever seen have been Intel platform.
Visicalc, the other killer app, is a different story, however.
Cheers,
Chuck
3:10 p.m.
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I thought EP was strictly an 8080-CP/M product. It
wouldn't surprise
me if a 6502 version was eventually produced, but the only versions
I've ever seen have been Intel platform.
Electric Pencil was the very first software I bought for my TRS-80
Model III (Z80).
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
3:34 p.m.
> did you know that Electric Pencil was available
on PC?
On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Jim Leonard wrote:
I did, and I've always wanted to try it, but I
couldn't find a copy
anywhere. Being that it has its roots on, what, Apple II? I would
imagine it would be very fast indeed.
You are probably thinking of "Easy Writer" by John ("Captain Crunch")
Draper
Electric Pencil was written by Michael Shrayer BEFORE CP/M was readily
available. One of my inspirations for writing XenoCopy was seeing ads in
the 1970s for a program to copy files from Electric Pencil diskettes to
CP/M diskettes.
It was later re-released for TRS-80.
I don't know the details, but Harv Pennington (author of "TRS-80 Disk and
Other Mysteries" and publisher of that series) was behind an IBM-PC
release.
When I was closing down, I had two shrink-wrapped copies, and a signed
one. I think that Sellam got one, another went at VCF. I don't know
where the other one is.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
1:49 a.m.
New subject: Vintage Computer footage in "The Trap"
How many different systems has any of the UK contingent been able to
identify on the BBC 2 Adam Curtis series "The Trap"? He certainly
seems to like his tape drives!
Cheers,
Chuck
27 Mar
27 Mar
4:28 a.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS
is the big display
update bottleneck. Some programs achieved very fast screen updates by
writing directly to the display memory. The venerable list.com comes to
mind.
Most of the ones I tested already write directly to screen ram -- the
slowdown occurs when the internal structure the text is kept in (partial
span trees, etc.) is so complex that merely painting the screen by
traversing the structure is too slow. The fastest editors usually don't
have a functional undo because such functionality usually requires
something slightly more complex than a simple linked list of lines/strings.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
26 Mar
26 Mar
1:38 p.m.
On 26 Mar 2007 at 1:04, Jim Leonard wrote:
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.
In defense of VEDIT (which I don't use), it should be noted that
there are older versions that will work quite well on 8088 systems.
AFAIK, it's the only one in the list that was ported to the IBM
Displaywriter. If you're interested in others, I can dig around a
bit and perhaps find a couple you missed.
My own editor that I've used for over 25 years, is like TERSE, small
and originally hosted on an 8080 CP/M. It's 11K, but has things such
as shell out, capture output, variable indent and shortcut language-
element keys (e.g., type Alt-M and you get a complete "int main(int
argc, char *argv[]) { };" sequence). One of these days, I'm going
to add long filename support. Every once in awhile, I try someone
else's but I always return to my own. They'll probably bury a copy
of it with my mortal remains.
Cheers,
Chuck
4:12 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated:
My own editor that I've used for over 25 years, is like TERSE, small
and originally hosted on an 8080 CP/M. It's 11K, but has things such
as shell out, capture output, variable indent and shortcut language-
element keys (e.g., type Alt-M and you get a complete "int main(int
argc, char *argv[]) { };" sequence). One of these days, I'm going
to add long filename support. Every once in awhile, I try someone
else's but I always return to my own. They'll probably bury a copy
of it with my mortal remains.
Is the source code available to those that ask?
-spc (Very interested ... )
5:33 p.m.
My own editor that I've used for over 25 years, is
like TERSE, small
and originally hosted on an 8080 CP/M. It's 11K, but has things such
as shell out, capture output, variable indent and shortcut language-
element keys (e.g., type Alt-M and you get a complete "int main(int
argc, char *argv[]) { };" sequence). One of these days, I'm going
to add long filename support. Every once in awhile, I try someone
else's but I always return to my own. They'll probably bury a copy
of it with my mortal remains.
I'm the same way - my editor started back in my Altair days (in 8080
assembly language), then got ported to 6809 assembly for my 6809
system, and finally ended up in C, where it routinely gets recompiled
for whatever system I happen to be wanting to use. It's small, simple,
powerful enough for my purposes and most importantly - it's the same
no matter what platform I'm using - I've also tried other,more fancy/
powerful tools - but I too always come back home.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
27 Mar
27 Mar
4:28 a.m.
dave06a at dunfield.com wrote:
Since I admire the both of you, it looks like I'm going to have to
follow in your footsteps and write my own editor :-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
My own editor
that I've used for over 25 years, is like TERSE, small
and originally hosted on an 8080 CP/M. It's 11K, but has things such
as shell out, capture output, variable indent and shortcut language-
element keys (e.g., type Alt-M and you get a complete "int main(int
argc, char *argv[]) { };" sequence). One of these days, I'm going
to add long filename support. Every once in awhile, I try someone
else's but I always return to my own. They'll probably bury a copy
of it with my mortal remains.
I'm the same way - my editor started back in my Altair days (in 8080
assembly language), then got ported to 6809 assembly for my 6809
system, and finally ended up in C, where it routinely gets recompiled
for whatever system I happen to be wanting to use. It's small, simple,
powerful enough for my purposes and most importantly - it's the same
no matter what platform I'm using - I've also tried other,more fancy/
powerful tools - but I too always come back home. 
26 Mar
26 Mar
1:53 p.m.
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.
One other factor you have forget, many small text editors could
only do 64K sized text files. Terse for example comes to mind.
1:37 p.m.
woodelf wrote:
One other factor you have forget, many small text
editors could
only do 64K sized text files. Terse for example comes to mind.
Ack, I hadn't realized that. I will update the page with that information.
I've also received several suggestions for stuff I missed (XyWrite,
TM.COM, others so no doubt the page will remain a work in progress :)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
2:18 p.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.
4:30 p.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
One editor I didn't see listed was PE, by IBM.
It had #1, I'm not sure
Ironically I couldn't find a copy of Personal Editor -- I found clones
of it for 32-bit platforms but not the original or the later DOS 2.0
rewrite (added path support). If you have it and can send it to me, I'd
be happy to eval it and comment about it in the article...
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
6:28 p.m.
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.
Well,
I'm surprised you haven't just rolled your own ;) Simple editors
are not very difficult to write, I'm sure you can find various
libraries/routines to do most of the grunt work for you and you could be
the first person in 15 years to roll a new DOS text editor :)
On a more serious note, have you checked out the Borland Editor
Toolbox? IIRC it let you roll an editor similar in features to their
Pascal 3.0 environment (which was a decent editor for it's time, though
I think you lost your undo buffer after a save, or was that the early
versions of Brief). You could customize as needed.
George
27 Mar
27 Mar
4:33 a.m.
George Currie wrote:
Well, I'm surprised you haven't just rolled
your own ;) Simple editors
are not very difficult to write, I'm sure you can find various
libraries/routines to do most of the grunt work for you and you could be
the first person in 15 years to roll a new DOS text editor :)
Writing a basic editor is easy -- speed and a functional undo,
unfortunately, are not, and take some planning. DOS memory is segmented
so you can't just insert characters and move memory down/up one byte at
a time (and speed would be an issue with large files anyway). Nor can
you go super-crazy with your data structure, because you'll sacrifice
speed. Every year I sit down ready to write my own editor, and I
usually give up after 3 minutes of trying to figure out the best
compromise between my time, speed, and a functional undo. (Hence the
research and article I posted.)
On a more serious note, have you checked out the
Borland Editor
Toolbox? IIRC it let you roll an editor similar in features to their
Yep; full example editor is 170KB and has no undo, but maybe I missed a
source directive somewhere in building the example project. I'll take
another look at it.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
28 Mar
28 Mar
3:28 p.m.
Jim---
On Mar 25, 2007, at 11:04 PM, 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.
Interesting post! Brings back a lot of memories... it is
interesting to see how many editors from the days of yore are still
sold and supported today (Vedit, Lugaru Epsilon, etc).
A couple of points. Sprint from Borland was another one of the
products they bought and then basically rendered unrecognizable. I
believe it was originally "The Final Word" from Mark of the Unicorn,
which I absolutely loved. Not really a "text editor", but more of
halfway between a text editor and full word processor.
Someone mentioned the Borland Editor Toolbox. I *loved* those
products. Borland had an Editor Toolbox, Database Toolbox, Games
Toolbox, etc. Those were lots of fun to play with.
As for SlickEdit... yes, highly recommended. I remember when it was
first released (text-only interface) and loving it. It was one of
the few editors that ran on both DOS and OS/2, and took advantage of
OS/2's features to make itself faster.
Mark
6291
days inactive
6293
days old
26 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dave06a＠dunfield.com -
g＠kurico.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
medavidson＠mac.com -
mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us -
spc＠conman.org -
trixter＠oldskool.org -
zmerch-cctalk＠30below.com