Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!shelby!agate!linus!linus!mwunix.mitre.org!jcmorris
From: jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Editor...
Message-ID: <122658@linus.mitre.org>
Date: 9 Oct 90 14:28:49 GMT
References: <N8DDq1w163w@zooid.UUCP> <26562@cs.yale.edu>
Sender: usenet@linus.mitre.org
Reply-To: jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris)
Organization: The Mitre Corporation
Lines: 25

In a recent article spolsky-joel@cs.yale.edu (Joel Spolsky) writes:
>In article <N8DDq1w163w@zooid.UUCP> dve@zooid.UUCP (David Mason) writes:
>>Did anyone ever think about creating an editor for the various INI files? 
>
>Have you ever seen the program SYSEDIT.EXE? It may be fairly
>undocumented but it comes with Windows and sits in your \win\system
>directory... I really like it, use it all the time.

Well...SYSEDIT is effectively a NOTEPAD app which automatically opens the
four primary configuration files SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and
CONFIG.SYS.  It doesn't "know" anything about the contents of the files;
it's just a convenient text editor.

Anyone doing complex work with Windows, though, should be aware that SYSEDIT
will fail to start cleanly if you have sufficiently large files.  In my case
I suddenly started getting error messages from it ("UNABLE TO LOAD WIN.INI")
which I finally found to be caused by a sudden increase in the size of
some of the four files.  There seems to be a hardwired buffer size which
isn't capable of being expanded to meet the need of the system.  (In my case
I have both PCL and PostScript printers, and between them they made the
WIN.INI file over 800 lines long.  This caused SYSEDIT to refuse to load
either WIN.INI *or* SYSTEM.INI.  Removing *three* lines of comments in 
WIN.INI now lets it load SYSTEM.INI but not WIN.INI.  Strange.)

Joe Morris