Summary of MSDOS text editors

[Kenneth B. Bass]

First, I would like to thank those of you who replied
to my request. Although I have not had time to examine
any of the editors in detail, I will give a summary of
the replies that I received.

For those who missed my original request, I will restate it.
I am looking for a simple, but versatile text editor - as
opposed to a word processor - to run under MSDOS. Our main
need is for editing source files, where we don't need any of
the 'nice' functions that most word processors have.

Many different editors were suggested to me. Of those, two were
by far most popular. The first was the IBM Personal Editor.
Those who recommended it seemed most impressed with its price -
about $100.

The other popular editor was Edix, by Emerging Technology
in Boulder, Co. Although much more expensive (about $400), Edix
seems to provide many of those features that you always thought
would be nice to have. Some of these include (up to 4) windows,
easy redefinition of keys - including function keys, and also
user defined macros.

Many others were recommended, but most of these were associated
with a particular language (such as DeSmet C,and Turbo Pascal).
Also, I was informed that 'PC Tech Journal' had a review of 16 text
editors a few issues ago (no date was given).

As I said, I haven't tried any of these yet. This was mainly just
a summary of the info. I received.

Thanks to those who replied,

linus!kbb

[dg...@ecsvax.uucp]

An excellent word processor and text editor is PC-WRITE, a program distributed
on a "commission shareware" basis. PC-WRITE can be had for $10 from the
author, Quicksoft (219 First N. #224, Seattle, WA 98109, phone (206)
282-0452). It supports two windows on the screen, moving text from file to
file, suspending editing to go play in DOS underneath PC-WRITE (and returning
to PC-WRITE just where you were), on-screen help, etc. etc. etc. Version 1.4
is good, but version 1.5 is outstanding (and has the extra features like
extensive on-screen help I raved about in the last sentence). I'd use it
no matter what it cost.
(Within reason!)
By the way, if you really like it, the author would like you to send $75, in
return for which you get the source (!!), phone support, and a $25 commission
for each sucker other person you get to "register" (pay $75 for) a copy
got from you.
I have no connection with Quicksoft other than being an appreciative
customer.

[to...@islenet.uucp]

Not to belabor the point, but the editor that comes with Turbo
Pascal is not just for editing Turbo Pascal source code. The
editor simply manipulates standard sequential text files. I
use it to create and edit source code for Turbo Pascal, MRI
Modula-2, and Microsoft/Lattice C. And it would work just as
well with any other language that requires its source to be
stored as sequential text files.

Its only real limitations are:
-no windows
-60+K bytes max file size

Its strengths are:
-follows Wordstar style commands
if you know how to use Wordstar, you know how to use
the Turbo Pascal editor right away
-supports autoindenting for block structured languages
-program is small and takes up very little disk space (33K)
-relatively fast
-keys can be redefined
-relatively cheap (still $49.95 with T-Pascal compiler)

Todd Ogasawara -- University of Hawaii -- Dept. of Psychology
{ dual, vortex, uhpgvax }!islenet!todd