VDE speller now available on request

[Eric Meyer]

Prompted by a feeling of growing absurdity in the latest round of discussion
of the VDE spell checker, I've been contemplating the following facts:

1. According to online data, Microlytics Inc. of Pittsford NY was declared
dissolved on 26 June 2002.

2. The number of people still using VDE (or DOS software at all) in November
2021 is very small and of no further economic significance.

3. I no longer receive shareware income from VDE myself, and never distributed
as many copies of the speller as my advance payment to Microlytics would have
covered anyway.


So I now find the following conclusion reasonable: while I still don't feel
comfortable simply posting the speller as an online download, I will
henceforth provide a single copy to the occasional user who requests it, under
the same obligation as before not to further distribute it themselves.

-- Eric.

[T Stenz]

Hello all,

First post here and had been a long time user of VDE from the CP/M days.

I say was as I had cancer and the resulting chemo caused neuropathy in my hands. My touch typing is in the toilet. Plus I'm using Linux Mint on my computer. There's ways to get VDE to run on it but I'm just not going to bother.

With not using VDE anymore I haven't had any questions about using it and my ability to answer any is vanishing. But I did register VDE and have the spelling overlay and the dictionary and don't foresee any circumstance that I'll ever use it again.

Eric, do you have any idea if giving my spelling overlay and dictionary to any one person would be a problem?  It's doubtful there's a big demand for it. Having one license available might take care of the demand for the next ten years.

Meanwhile on my 'puter I've gone to the dark side and use Libreoffice for word processing and the Xed text editor for the times I don't need the bells and whistles. I've tried 'rassling with EMACS but it keeps 'rassling back.

All the best,

Tom Stenzel

Livonia, MI

[Thomas Desi]

Hello, and Eric, 

I am a User of VDE on a "bare metal" FreeDos machine.

As I am German native: is there a GERMAN speller available? 

Thanks, and - yes, to implement the UTF8 feature lately was a clever move!

Thomas 

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[dmccunney]

'On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 9:30 PM T Stenz <tomste...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Meanwhile on my 'puter I've gone to the dark side and use Libreoffice for word processing and the Xed text editor for the times I don't need the bells and whistles. I've tried 'rassling with EMACS but it keeps 'rassling back.

I'm not sure I'd call that the dark side.

LibreOffice Write is a popular alternative to MS Word, because it is
both cross platform and can produce MS Word documents. (I know
writers who use LO Writer, but keep Word around for submission drafts.
Editors *live* in Word's Track Changes feature for revision letters,
and up till relatively recently, LO Writer didn't properly support it.

Xed is a decent text editor under Linux. (There are lots of text
editors for Linux.)

I have Emacs here, as well as Vim and an assortment of other things.
(I'm pure Win10 Pro at the moment, but dual booted Windows and Linux
on a previous machine.)

Emacs is extraordinarily powerful, but is complex and requires
configuration to be really useful. Coming up the learning curve to
understand how to configure it repels many potential users.

I had a Unix machine at home before getting a PC running MSDOS, and
had emacs installed on it. There is an extant WordStar mode for Gnu
Emacs, which configures it to use WordStar key assignments. I
installed it to avoid retraining my fingers.

You can find Gnu Emacs WordStar mode here:
http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode.el

> All the best,
> Tom Stenzel

______
Dennis

[Eric Meyer]

T Stenz wrote:
> Eric, do you have any idea if giving my spelling overlay and dictionary to any
> one person would be a problem?

Hi Tom, and good to hear from you again... did we meet on Compuserve eons ago
then?

As you saw here, I've concluded that the time for worrying about the speller
license is long past. I'm still not comfortable posting it for downloading,
but demand would be so slight that I will now offer it to anyone who asks.
You can refer the person you have in mind to me, or take care of it
yourself... but you should still keep your copy because what I just read about
CIPN suggests that it's not usually permanent, and I do hope yours improves!

I'm a creature of habit myself and continue to use Windows, VDE (under vDOS+
now), and WordPerfect when I need fancy printing. Now there's a company that
knows its market and keeps producing a good and trouble-free product.

-- Eric.

[Eric Meyer]

Thomas Desi wrote:
> Hello, and Eric,
>
> I am a User of VDE on a "bare metal" FreeDos machine.
> As I am German native: is there a GERMAN speller available?
>
> Thanks, and - yes, to implement the UTF8 feature lately was a clever move!

Hallo Thomas und herzlich willkommen,

You'll find a recent discussion of language dictionaries on this site, whose
upshot was "No": I licensed only US and UK English versions years ago, and
while a wider variety of dictionaries may be available for other editors that
also used the Microlytics speller, those don't seem to be the right version or
format for VDE to load them. Tut mir leid.

By the way, regarding UTF8: I'm really not an expert on file formats, and
learn mostly by trial and error. I found a glitch in VDE197 where special
characters still aren't read correctly in some files, like a Kant essay that I
recently got from Gutenberg Project. I do have a fix for it which I can offer
if anyone needs it, though I wouldn't normally issue a new version already,
and even less so now.

-- Eric.

[Thomas Desi]

Hello Eric,

regarding the UTF8 "glitch" in VDE197: I would really appreciate to know more about that fix you mention -

Mich würde das interessieren, da ich zwischen DOS und MAC/PC UTF8 Files transferiere.

Thanks / Danke sehr!
beste Grüße, Thomas

[Moy Wong]

All,

I'm *really lame* with Unix editors, but some time ago, I cobbled
together a configuration for 'jove' (Johnathan's Own Version of Emacs)
that gave me a sort of WordStar functionality.

Even though there are plenty of editors in Unix with more realistic
WordStar emulations, I still use 'jove' today, probably out of habit and
familiarity with the quirks of my configuration.

I can post the config file if anyone is interested. No, it's not well
documented, hasn't been maintained and may not work for anyone. YMMV.

-moy


]> Meanwhile on my 'puter I've gone to the dark side and use Libreoffice for word processing and the Xed text editor for the times I don't need the bells and whistles. I've tried 'rassling with EMACS but it keeps 'rassling back.

]
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[dmccunney]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2022 at 10:48 AM Moy Wong <m...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> I'm *really lame* with Unix editors, but some time ago, I cobbled
> together a configuration for 'jove' (Johnathan's Own Version of Emacs)
> that gave me a sort of WordStar functionality.

One I used back when was the Daniel Lawrence version of MicroEMACS.
The best current place to get it is the JASSPA siteat
http://www.jasspa.com/

I had a Unix machine (an AT&T 3B1, which I still have) as well as an
XT clone running MSDOS. ME had very portable C source available, and
it would build out of the box using cc on the 3B1. It includes a
macro language, and I was able to get pretty comprehensive WordStar
emulation using a macro that trapped Ctrl- K, O, and P sequences and
did the appropriate thing. The 3B1 also had an assortment of
dedicated keys on the keyboard that I could trap as well in ME.

I could have the same editor, with the same configuration, on both machines.

Gnu Emacs could be built on the 31, but ME was much faster to invoke and use.

> Even though there are plenty of editors in Unix with more realistic
> WordStar emulations, I still use 'jove' today, probably out of habit and
> familiarity with the quirks of my configuration.

Wearing another hat, I'm principal maintainer at
https://texteditors.org, which documents every editor and others have
been able to find. We are up to 1,957 now. Most of my effort since
joining has been documenting editors on things that aren't PCs, like
pocket calculators. (Yes, those exist.) There are lots of *nix text
editors listed. Emacs editors are thier own family.

> I can post the config file if anyone is interested. No, it's not well
> documented, hasn't been maintained and may not work for anyone. YMMV.

Sure. I collect stuff like that. I can put a copy in the Jove entry
on teh wiki.

> -moy
______
Dennis

[Eric Meyer]

Thomas Desi wrote:
> regarding the UTF8 "glitch" in VDE197: I would really appreciate to know more about that fix you mention -

Special characters like ö, ß in UTF8 text files normally seemed to appear as
the hex code C2 followed by their standard ANSI code, but apparently in some
files it's now C3 instead followed by a version of that code with one
different bit also. There's something about Unicode (or versions of it?) that
I don't quite understand, but I did find a solution that works, at least for
common characters like those.

I used to distribute small fixes like this as patches for users to install
with DEBUG, but few may have that anymore, and I'm a bit rusty myself by now.
If you do a lot of this sort of work, the easiest thing would likely be for me
to send you my tweaked version of VDE.EXE.

-- Eric.

[Eric Meyer]

dmccunney wrote:
> Wearing another hat, I'm principal maintainer at
> https://texteditors.org, which documents every editor and others have
> been able to find. We are up to 1,957 now. Most of my effort since
> joining has been documenting editors on things that aren't PCs, like
> pocket calculators. (Yes, those exist.)

Did I ever mention that in the early 1980s I wrote a text editor for the HP41
calculator, which I still have of course? It may have been published in a
user group newsletter, and was called... EDIT.

[Mark P. Fishman]

According to my Windows 10, debug is still available and can be found in WINDOWS/system32/debug

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--

RAID is not backup.

Backup is not archiving.

Anything that exists in only one place doesn't really exist.

[Eric Meyer]

Mark P. Fishman wrote:
> According to my Windows 10, debug is still available and can be found
> in WINDOWS/system32/debug

That doesn't seem to be in my Home edition of Win10, but I copied DEBUG.EXE
(and a few other things) from my WinXP system and it runs fine.

[Thomas Desi]

This is indeed a very generous offer, to make me your VDE version available.
I am currently travelling and couldn't "debug" or try to get into this sort of work. I am not a programmer oder coder, just the reason why I like VDE so much, it does all the things without being ... a coder...

Thank you so much, if you could help out,
as I am having this öüäßÄÖÜ Problem and I was digging into the UTF8 and ASCII and CODEPAGE tables but couldn't figure out, what was wrong. It is kind of already challenging, to go from PC to MAC even today (I am speaking about my special keyboard, which is a PC programmed one...)

Best regards,
Danke sehr herzlich im Voraus,
falls möglich, wäre mich das außerordentlich freuen und mir sehr helfen.

Thomas

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>

[Eric Meyer]

Thomas, I've sent you my current test version of VDE. Let me know if you
don't get it.

For everyone else, the problem is that when VDE197 (or previous) loads certain
UTF8 files, you get two garbage bytes instead of a special character like ö or
ß. That seems to be fixed now but I'm sure Thomas will test it well.

-- Eric.

[Moy Wong]

]From: dmccunney <dennis....@gmail.com>

[quoted message snipped for brevity]

]Wearing another hat, I'm principal maintainer at

]https://texteditors.org, which documents every editor and others have
]been able to find. We are up to 1,957 now. Most of my effort since
]joining has been documenting editors on things that aren't PCs, like
]pocket calculators. (Yes, those exist.) There are lots of *nix text
]editors listed. Emacs editors are thier own family.
]
]> I can post the config file if anyone is interested. No, it's not well
]> documented, hasn't been maintained and may not work for anyone. YMMV.
]
]Sure. I collect stuff like that. I can put a copy in the Jove entry
]on teh wiki.
]
]> -moy
]______
]Dennis

I did not know that--I love 'texteditors.org!'

Here are the contents of the config file, '.joverc' that I made up years
ago. This configuration file allows 'jove' to speak WordStar, albeit
with an accent :^) Please share.

I'm not an expert in either 'jove' or *nix, but I should be able to
answer questions about some of the peculiarties of this configuration.
An important caveat is that ctrl-X is sacred in 'jove,' so ctrl-J serves
as the new command for cursor down.

-moy


# Wordstar emulation .joverc by Moy Wong
# Revised 3/29/97
# Revised 12/6/98 for DOS jove.exe
# Revised 12/19/98 for WS-style ^K^C, ^K^V
# Revised 12/20/98 corrected ^K^C, ^K^V wrt 'Point-pushed' behavior
# 12/21/98

# 12/27/98
# set tmp-file-pathname (variable)
# show-match-mode (variable)

# 12/22/98 Add this for online use
set allow-^S-and-^Q on
set disable-biff on
set tmp-file-pathname ~/trash
#

set make-backup-files on
set match-regular-expressions on
set right-margin 72
set scroll-step 1
set mode-line %[%w%w %(joveWS %t%) (%n%m~:%b) file="%F" %] %M %e %(%C%)
set case-ignore-search on
set files-should-end-with-newline on
set scroll-bar on
set mark-threshold 32767
set abort-char ^[

bind-to-key backward-word ^A
bind-to-key fill-paragraph ^B
bind-to-key next-page ^C
bind-to-key forward-character ^D
bind-to-key previous-line ^E
define-macro next-word ^[f^[f^A
bind-macro-to-key next-word ^F
bind-to-key delete-next-character ^G
bind-to-key next-line ^J
define-macro repeat-find ^Q^F^M
bind-macro-to-key repeat-find ^L
bind-to-key newline-and-backup ^N
bind-to-key quoted-insert ^P
bind-to-key previous-page ^R
bind-to-key backward-character ^S
bind-to-key kill-next-word ^T
bind-to-key yank ^U
bind-to-key over-write-mode ^V
bind-to-key scroll-down ^W
define-macro kill-line ^Q^S^K^B^J^K^Y
bind-macro-to-key kill-line ^Y
define-macro next-twolines ^J^J
bind-macro-to-key next-twolines ^X^X
bind-to-key scroll-up ^Z
#bind-to-key kill-previous-word ^?
bind-to-key unbound ^^

bind-to-key select-buffer ^[b
bind-to-key i-search-forward ^[s
bind-to-key next-error ^[E
bind-to-key next-error ^[e
bind-to-key exit-jove ^[Q
bind-to-key exit-jove ^[q
bind-to-key apropos ^[H
bind-to-key apropos ^[h
bind-to-key scroll-right ^[,
bind-to-key scroll-left ^[.
bind-to-key describe-key ^K?
bind-to-key pop-mark ^\
define-macro set-first-mark ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
bind-macro-to-key set-first-mark ^K^B
define-macro copy-region-to-point ^@^\^\^K^Y^U^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^U^\^K^B
bind-macro-to-key copy-region-to-point ^K^C
bind-to-key visit-file ^K^D
bind-to-key list-buffers ^[B
bind-to-key buffer-position ^[p
define-macro buffer-info ^[p^[B
bind-macro-to-key buffer-info ^K^I
bind-to-key set-mark ^K^K
bind-to-key read-only-mode ^K^O
bind-to-key exit-jove ^K^Q
bind-to-key insert-file ^K^R
bind-to-key save-file ^K^S
define-macro move-region-to-point ^\^K^Y^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^U^\^K^B
bind-macro-to-key move-region-to-point ^K^V
bind-to-key write-region ^K^W
define-macro save-and-exit ^K^S^K^Q
bind-macro-to-key save-and-exit ^Kx
bind-macro-to-key save-and-exit ^K^X
bind-to-key kill-region ^K^Y
bind-to-key case-region-upper ^K"
bind-to-key case-region-lower ^K'

bind-to-key describe-command ^O?
bind-to-key auto-indent ^O^A
bind-to-key left-margin-here ^O^L
bind-to-key auto-fill-mode ^O^M
bind-to-key next-window ^O^N
bind-to-key right-margin-here ^O^R
bind-to-key grow-window ^O^S
bind-to-key number-lines-in-window ^O^T
bind-to-key split-current-window ^O^W
bind-to-key delete-other-windows ^O^Y
bind-to-key clear-and-redraw ^O^Z

bind-to-key apropos ^Q?
bind-to-key query-replace-string ^Q^A
bind-to-key end-of-file ^Q^C
bind-to-key end-of-line ^Q^D
bind-to-key beginning-of-window ^Q^E
bind-to-key search-forward ^Q^F
bind-to-key goto-line ^Q^I
bind-to-key beginning-of-file ^Q^R
bind-to-key beginning-of-line ^Q^S
bind-to-key end-of-window ^Q^X
bind-to-key kill-to-end-of-line ^Q^Y

bind-to-key describe-bindings ^X?

###