Found my favorite DOS editor

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2021 at 15:06, Adrian Graham <binarydinosaurs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 Oct 2021, at 12:58, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> Discontinued some years ago, sadly.
>
> Yes, and instead they made BBEdit free for the most part. That’s what I’m using. Still got TextWrangler on the older Macs of course.

True and fair.

I personally have no use for language plugins and so on -- I only need
text editors for plain-text files, not program code.

The thing is that I want and like small, fast, simple editors that
start very quickly and just do text and nothing else. 90% of the time
I don't want colour-coding or syntax highlighting or any of that. I
just want something that loads too fast to see and has the standard UI
with CUA menus and so on so I can do what I have to do and get out,
ASAP.

Which is where a lot of widely-admired editors fall down. Atom, VSCode
etc are vast lumbering things. Anything written in Javascript made
into a standalone app inevitably becomes Howl's Moving Castle, to echo
Steve Yegge's observation:

«
Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.
Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you."
Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.
»

TextWrangler was much smaller than BBEdit so it won for me. Once it
wasn't an option, well, BBEdit lost out.

I found a tiny thing called "TextEd". It's like macOS Text Edit but
much smaller and faster because it doesn't support formatting or RTF
or anything. I can post a link later; I'm on a different machine right
now.

Vi, Joe, Nano, Pico etc also fail this, because of their weird UIs and
because they're shell-based and frankly if I'm in a GUI I want a GUI
app. Tilde is my preferred console Linux editor now, but sadly, it
doesn't work with things like the Git commit command -- no template is
inserted. So I have my default set to mcedit, which is still a bit
weird but at least only a bit.


-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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