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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!rutgers!caip!rbthomas
From: rbthomas@caip.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Editors.
Message-ID: <4051@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sat, 31-Jan-87 15:10:17 EST
Article-I.D.: caip.4051
Posted: Sat Jan 31 15:10:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Jan-87 23:42:18 EST
References: <8701241720.aa11929@SPARK.BRL.ARPA>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 34


> 2) It has to be a screen editor and preferably as close to my beloved emacs as
> possible.  Rebindable keys would be wonderful.

There is a very nice emacs available for the 128K IIe, (it's called
Amacs) which you can order for under 100 dollars from the developer,
who lives in Boston somewhere.  If you are interested, send me email
and I will look it up.  It has rebindable keys, but only a very
limited programmability (it all has to fit in 128K, remember!)  It
cannot deal with files that are larger than can fit in its in-memory
buffer, because it does not use a disk scratch file.  On the other
hand, it is quite fast, because it doesn't have to go to disk for
anything.


The biggest problem I have with it has nothing to do with amacs at all.
My problem is that everything that runs on the Apple II that needs to
do text editing, already has its own text editor built in, and each of these
editors are incompatible with all the others!  Amacs is an excellent
stand-alone editor, but I don't use it as often as I would like, because
I can't invoke it from inside (say) appleworks or (say again) merlin-pro.
Also, I have had poor luck getting it to integrate with Kayan Pascal
which does have a stand-alone editor, so substituting Amacs for it
should be a breeze, right?  Actually, the problems with substituting
Amacs for the Kayan editor are nearly all on the Kayan side.  Kayan
has a 'library' file that it expects to be loaded, and does not check
for when it starts up.  Amacs doesn't know from nothing about Kayan's
library file, so it uses that memory area for something (I dont know
or care what.)  So when switching back to Kayan from Amacs, it blows
up! Grump!  Maybe things are better with the new version of Kayan.

Rick Thomas

rbthomas@caip.rutgers.edu