Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ub!dsinc!bagate!sjuphil!tmoody
From: tmoody@sjuphil.uucp (T. Moody)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: PC Editors
Message-ID: <1991Feb25.153922.10493@sjuphil.uucp>
Date: 25 Feb 91 15:39:22 GMT
References: <1991Feb15.032234.4724@sjuphil.uucp> <70729@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: tmoody@sjuphil.UUCP (T. Moody)
Organization: Saint Joseph's University
Lines: 69

In article <70729@microsoft.UUCP> steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Hastings) writes:
>Brief, Sage Professional Editor, and the Microsoft Programmer's
>WorkBench editor that comes with Microsoft C version 6 satisfy all your
>listed criteria.  They all share one drawback: slow startup time.

Brief has already been mentioned by several people here.  I'll look into
the other two.  Thank you.

>If you will bend some of your criteria, there are some good choices
>with some tradeoffs:
>
>Microsoft Word 5.5 is great for editing, spell-checking, thesaurus, etc.;
>has multiple windows; in fact meets all your criteria except for the
>ability to map commands to *any* key (you may only map to Ctrl and
>Ctrl+Shift keys) and the macro language, which does have some programming
>constructs like IF/ELSE but is not a full-blown language.  If you do use
>Word, I suggest you use its macro ability to make sure it always saves in
>text-only format; it is easy to save in Word format by mistake.

I have used Word 5.0, at least, for correspondence and reports. 
Frankly, it seems a bit expensive to be used as an ascii editor, and it
is *very* slow loading on my XT.  Also, when a file is saved as ascii,
it puts carriage returns at the end of each line, so that you can't
readily reformat the paragraphs after modifying them.  I suppose a macro
could take care of this, however.

>PC-Write is a fantastic ASCII-only editor that meets most of your criteria;
>its maximum file size is limited to what will fit in your 640k, its
>macros are strings of keystrokes, and its windowing features are
>limited.  But it is a real word processor, designed for writers, and it
>starts up *instantly* and runs fast on even an XT.

Hmm... I've seen this around, but never tried it.  I note that there is
also a "lite" version.  I'll check it out.

>Personal Editor III, available from Personally Developed Software (phone:
>1-800-IBM-PCSW), satisfies most if not all of your criteria.  I have used
>PE2, and it had all the features you want but the full-blown macro
>language.  PE3 might have added that, but I have no data.

Does it have regular expressions and a full undo capability?

This raises an interesting point that I didn't think of when I posted
the original message.  It seems to me that a full undo capability is
especially desirable (even necessary) in any editor that supports
regular expressions.  This is because an error in a regexp search and
replace can really louse up a document royally, often in ways that are
not at all simple to undo manually.  This is the main shortcoming of
micro-emacs, in my view (otherwise, it is excellent).

>For writing a book, I suggest you use an actual word processor -- either
>PC-Write or Microsoft Word 5.5.  Word 5.5 is better in many ways, but
>costs more; PC-Write is shareware, and you can pay as little as $15 to use
>it legally forever.

Again, the irony is that what you pay for in most high-end word
processing programs is a lot of powerful formatting tools:  the ability
to put footnotes at the bottom of a page, to do on-screen multi-column
formatting, italics, fancy fonts, etc.  This stuff is great for reports
and things that you essentially are going to "publish" yourself.  If you
are submitting work to a publisher, however, most like to receive a
floppy disk with pure ascii files.




-- 
Todd Moody * tmoody@sjuphil.sju.edu
            "In what furnace was thy brain?"  -- William Blake


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com