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1991-01-01
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EDITOR WORKBENCH
----------------
1. What is the Editor Workbench ?
---------------------------------
The Editor Workbench (EW) is a simple text editor which
edits plain ASCII files of up to 240 characters per line,
999 lines per file, and a maximum total size of around 50k
per file. It is designed as a programmers tool, not a word
processor, so it doesn't offer features like word wrap or
print formatting. Instead it allows the programmer to create
a customised workbench for those programming languages which
don't come in an integrated programming environment, such as
the DOS BATCH language, or A86.
2. Installation and Invocation.
-------------------------------
The program can be run from the hard disk or a diskette.
Best results are obtained with a hard disk. Copy the files
from the diskette into a subdirectory called EW.
If you want to use a customised configuration for EW then
you need to be in the EW directory when you start the
program, but if you just want to quickly edit a file then
you can be in any directory, but you will only have one
screen of help information available when you press the help
button.
3. Trying out EW.
-----------------
First try EW in its simplest form, using the command EW
You will be presented with a menu of four options, change
drive, change directory, edit an old file, or create a new
file. If you specify a new file you are presented with a
window to enter the file name. Whenever you are presented
with a data entry field you may toggle insert on and off
with the Ins key, delete characters with the Del or
Backspace keys, jump to the ends of lines with Home and End,
and erase to the end of a line with Ctrl/Z. If you have
completely mistyped something you may untype any changes by
pressing the f2 key BEFORE you enter the data.
If you specify an old file you are presented with a menu.
All EW menus are scrolling. If there are more options than
can be displayed in the window then the menu will scroll
when you cursor past the bottom. The Home, End, PgUp, and
PgDn keys allow faster navigation of menus. Press enter to
select an option, or the ESCAPE key to back out of the menu
without making a selection. If you select a directory name
(ends in \ on the menu), rather than a file name then EW
will change to that directory and present a fresh menu of
file names.
At any time you can press f1 for HELP which summarises the
edit key details. When you use a customised configuration
you can get much more info from the help screens. Press
ESCAPE to leave HELP.
At any time you can press Alt D to shell to DOS so that you
can do the things that programmers always want to do in the
middle of an editing session, such as running CHKDSK or
formatting a floppy. To get back into EW from DOS type the
command EXIT
When you have selected an old file or specified a new file
you are dropped into the screen editor. There are few
surprises in this editor. It is a simple 240 column screen
editor.
CTRL Z deletes to the end of a line, and if the cursor is in
column 1 when you do this it deletes the whole line.
The Insert key toggles the insert function on and off. When
Insert is toggled on you can enter new lines just by
pressing the enter key. If the cursor is in column 1 it will
insert a new line before the current line. Otherwise it will
open up a new line immediately after the current line.
CTRL PgUp and CTRL Home get you back to the first line of
the file. CTRL PgDn and CTRL End get you to the last line of
the file. Press f4 and you will be asked which line number
you want to go to. Press f6 and you will be asked to enter a
string of characters, and EW will take you to the FIRST
occurrence of that string in the file. It ignores
UPPER/lower case differences for this search. Pressing f8
does the same but finds the NEXT occurrence of the string
after the current line.
Press f9 to mark the start of a block anf f10 to mark the
end of a block. Blocks can only be whole lines, not parts of
lines. When you set up a block the lines are highlighted.
Now you can use Shift f9 to jump to the start of the block,
Shift f10 to jump to the end, and shift f6 and shift f8 to
find the first or next occurrence of the string within the
block.
f3 brings up a menu of miscellaneous edit functions such as
deleting the marked block, moving it to another part of the
file, or sorting it.
f5 brings up a menu of miscellaneous file functions such as
writing the block to a new file, or combining a file from
disc with the one in memory.
Press ESCAPE to get out of the editor. If you have made any
changes you will be asked if you want to save the changes or
abandon them. When you have answered this question you will
be returned to the main menu, which now contains more than
just four options. Ignore these for now and just select
Quit, or press the ESCAPE key again.
4. Using EW with a monochrome screen.
-------------------------------------
Monochrome screens sometimes have trouble with the colour
combinations used in software designed for colour screens.
If this is the case try invoking EW with the /M parameter.
5. Using EW with a file specification.
--------------------------------------
You can pass a file spec to EW when you invoke it, e.g.
EW *.TXT
This will limit EW's directory search to files matching this
file spec. If you pass a filename without wild cards, e.g.
EW FRED.BAT
then EW will edit this file automatically, without you
having to select the OLD or NEW options from the menu. File
specs can be qualified with a directory and a disk drive
identifier if desired.
6. The ESCAPE character.
------------------------
One of the most infuriating things about many editors from a
programmers point of view is the impossibility of entering
the escape character, ascii 27. In EW, you can enter this
using the CTRL E combination, and it is displayed on the
screen as a back arrow.
7. Defaults.
------------
So whats so special about EW you may well ask, a pretty
standard text editor with a DOS shell option. So lets see
how we can get EW to do something a bit more useful to the
Batch File Programmer.
Invoke EW with the command
C>EW /D=BAT
This parameter causes EW to look for a Defaults File called
BAT.DFT, which again is just an ordinairy ascii file set up
using EW. (The default Defaults File is called EW.DFT but
you don't have to have one). The defaults file specifies
which directory and file spec, and help file to use, and how
to interface to the language you are using.
EW will now look only for batch files, i.e. using the spec
*.BAT. Try loading an old file and the file list is now
considerably shorter. Select TEST.BAT which is a very simple
batch file. Try the HELP key and you will discover that
there is considerably more HELP information than there was
before and its all relevent to programming in batch. This
help file is also just an ASCII file, set up with EW. EW is
worth using just for the Help file alone!
Now you can try those other options on the EW main menu.
Select RUN to run your batch file without having to quit the
EW program. Select Parameters to specify the parameters to
be passed to your program. Select Show Output to remind
yourself what the last screen of output looked like, and
select Variables to see what the current settings of the
environmental variables are.
The Defaults option on the menu allows you to select a new
set of defaults on the fly without having to exit EW.
9. Influences.
--------------
EW was originally developed as a batch program editor, and
has been greatly influenced by the wonderful development
environments found in the Borland Turbo products.