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From: mercury@ut-dillo.UUCP (Larry E. Baker)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc,net.micro.ti
Subject: Re: MIX editor "review"
Message-ID: <208@ut-dillo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 30-Nov-85 17:48:38 EST
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Posted: Sat Nov 30 17:48:38 1985
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> > 		due to problems with our TI PCs:  currently, the editor
> > 		must use the subset of the ANSI screen driver present in
> > 		the BIOS, which is so awful that the *editor* is reduced to
> > 		re-drawing the screen whenever you want to scroll the screen
> > 		down a line.  As soon as I can get my hands on a TI TRM,
> 
> I know of a few people with this editor and it's not the BIOS redrawing the
> screen, it's the editor.  Another symptom of this is that if they want to
> find, say, the fourth occurance of the word 'frobozz' the editor stops and
> redraws the screen on the three frobozzes in between.   This is the only
> negative thing I've heard them say about the thing.

Uh, I said "*editor*," but you have a point.  I don't know if the silly thing
will *continue* to re-draw the screen, even after I make the BIOS patch.  If
it does, I think that would be a major point against it.  I hope it has the
intelligence to use a more advanced screen driver, with, say, "insert-line"
escape codes.  If I can ever get reasonable TI documentation, and
can fish out the articles I remember seeing in PC Tech Journal on writing
serial device drivers, I'll make an attempt to write something a little
more potent than the awful ANSI support that TI provides in the BIOS.

Which will, BTW, be posted on the net if anyone's interested.

Also, there was one thing that I think I forgot to emphasize in my "review:"
the MIX editor has a "paging" feature that allows it to edit larger-than-
editor-memory files.  But you can only page *forward*.  I have not
encountered this myself (yet), but I can see it as an irritant.  In this
month's Dr. Dobbs there is a short review of the editor, and the author
claims that the edit buffer is about 15k, which is kind of small
if you have a machine with 512k installed.

With a hard disk I don't think the paging would be much more than a minor
irritant since, being a strong beliver in modularity, I keep most of my
source files < 15k.  But with the (abismally slow) floppy disk drives on
our TI's, this might be a problem.


-- 

Larry Baker                          mercury@ut-ngp.{ARPA, UUCP, UTEXAS.EDU}
University of Texas at Austin        ut-sally!ut-ngp!mercury@csnet-relay.CSNET
Computer Science/Physics             phgl774@uta3081.BITNET