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From: catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu (Tony Catone)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Wanted: WordStar-like editor
Message-ID: <12478@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 89 18:20:00 GMT
References: <26464@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <2167@trantor.harris-atd.com> <1309@hounix.UUCP> <6%filbo@ssyx.ucsc.edu> <4893@uoregon.uoregon.edu> <3809@tank.uchicago.edu>
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Reply-To: catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu (Tony Catone)
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In article <3809@tank.uchicago.edu> h3x2@tank.uchicago.edu (andrew abrams shapiro) writes:
>In article <4893@uoregon.uoregon.edu> lth@drizzle.UUCP (Lars Thomas Hansen) writes:
>
>>If you program under CP/M you might not find EMACS or its relatives
>>available to you. Otherwise, I'd rather suggest you switch editors than
>>try to look for an (elusive) WS-clone.
>
>EMACS lives in CP/M under the name of Perfect Writer.  PW was sold as
>a text processor with a bad formatter and passable spell checker, but
>the editor, PW.COM, is an EMACS (really MINCE) that works qyu// quite
>well.  It came wiuth all '83 Kaypro amchines (sorry -- the POC PC I'm
>using oesn't emulate a VT100 well enough for corrections!) and is
>very nice.  It has windowing and will handle up to 7 files at once.
>Not bad, considering that wi  it will run in less than 50K oif RAM!

The folks who originally hacked up MINCE and sold the rights to market it
as Perfect Writer later revised the product and marketed it themselves as
FinalWord.  Versions through 1.19 were available for both MS-DOS and CP/M.
It had a *lot* less bugs than Perfect Writer (the PW people were just 
marketing types) though you needed a seperate third party spell checker
of your choice.  The company used to be called Mark of the Unicorn, but
they changed their name to FinalWord Corp. after the release of FinalWord II.
The last version released was 2.20, and this is my favorite editor in the
entire world.  *Fully* reconfigurable, even down to customizable pull down
menus; programmable macro language with recursion; integrated spell checker;
edit up to 23 files in up to 6 windows; horizontal scrolling with a maximum
line length of 32,000 characters; editor swap file to protect against accidental
power losses; on and on.  This is the editor that Borland bought and hacked
up into Sprint, which we have in the office but I don't like as much, though
it may grow on me over time.

Versions of the old FW I are available *cheap*; the Computer Connection at
Penn was hocking them at $10 a pop.  Don't know if there were any CP/M copies
there; if anyone cares, I can check.  FinalWord Corp. was based in Cambridge,
and there may be remnants of them there, I don't know.

- Tony
  catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu
  catone@wharton.upenn.edu