A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/massinfo/maasinfo.mac

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 9.3 KB | 172 lines

MaasInfo.MacTexEd = Survey/evaluation of low-cost text editors available
on Macintosh computers, version of 1991.Jun.26.

Copyright 1991 by Robert Elton Maas, all rights reserved. This file is
posted as trivial shareware. If it is worth more than a dollar to you,
contact the author to arrange payment by giving the author some other
information of comparable value the author wants and/or get the file
MaasInfo.SQWA which is a listing of Specific Questions Waiting for
Answers which the author has already decided are acceptable for payment
of your trivial-shareware "fee".

These programs (applications, desk accessories, hotkeys) are listed in
sequence by ascending price, starting with the freeware. If you know of
any other inexpensive text editors that are available on the net and are
worth mentionning here, let the author know.


%% FREE -- Edit 2.0d1 -- APPL

Mostly conforms to Macintosh user interface, but there is no keyboard
equivalent for Save so you always have to pull down the menu. Doesn't
load the whole file into RAM, so you can edit really large files that
none of the other editors can handle. Unfortunately it doesn't work on a
Mac II, only on the monochrome compact Macs as far as I know. Saving a
file takes an awful long time in some cases such as when a hundred lines
have been cut from the top of a 400k file (about 5 minutes to save on a
Mac Plus). If the machine crashes during saving (like if you have the
WDEF virus around), your file is trashed. That happened to me once, after
which I exterminated WDEF from all my disks. Edit 2.0d1 has a bug whereby
if the file is larger than about 300-400k the scroll bar doesn't work
correctly. If you scroll by lines, fine, but as soon as you scroll down
by a page the window jumps to the very end of the file but the scroll bar
still shows you at the top so there's no way to get back at all except by
executing a search that fails which causes the program to reset to the
very top. Allows you to edit up to four files in separate Mac windows
simultaneously. This program is ideal for editing files too large for
other editors, providing it runs on your Mac and you can tolerate its
problems and and avoid having it do things that show its slowness.


%% FREE -- MicroEmacs -- APPL

This isn't interfaced well to the Mac at all, but it's usable if you're
familar with any version of EMACS from mainframe land. Conforms only
somewhat to the original EMACS and the Gnu Emacs command set, so watch
out for different commands to set the mark and such like that. But the
basic commands for character/word motion are standard, and defining a
single keyboard macro via clover-( and clover-) then calling it via
clover-E works ok. It doesn't always interface to MacroMaker correctly so
watch out. Searches can't be aborted (except by cold restart of your
Mac), and inside a macro loop if a search fails the program just goes
ahead and executes the next command instead of aborting the loop, so
beware! But if you need moderately powerful macro capability (search to
string, back up two words and then forward two characters, insert text,
delete 3 characters, etc.) or command capability (cut to end of line, go
to other window, paste, insert blank line, go back to first window) using
MacroMaker to encapsulate a whole sequence of commands into one
keystroke, it beats any of the other text editors I know. MicroEmacs also
has paragraph fill to any specified column width. Handles multiple files,
as many as you want (I've edited ten or twenty at a time), all in one Mac
window that is divided into sub-windows, but crashes your whole machine
if you exceed available memory, so beware! Doesn't let you change the
font that will be used to display text. If you can master the command
language (or already know it), this program is semi-ideal for complex
editing tasks where you want to program the task via keyboard-macro or
MacroMaker sequences of automatic commands (rather than try to do the
whole thing over and over and over a hundred times manually using
Macintosh-interface mouse actions and risk making 5% errors towards the
end when you are really bored sick).


%% FREE? (Unsolicited in mail on DiskWorld sampler) -- FlashPad -- HotKey

Not actually a text-file editor since it can edit only its own resources,
not an actual TEXT file. But it can be invoked via a user-defined hot key
from nearly anywhere (such as choose-file dialogs) so you can keep notes
here that are needed at such critical times when DAs and applications are
inaccessible, thus for such uses it beats out all the other programs
mentionned here. Doesn't use a DA slot (unless you configure it to also
be a DA). Allows editing exactly ten up-to-30k pages, each a resource.
Has word wrap. See also FlashWrite ][ which seems to be an updated
DA-only version of this program. This program is ideal for keeping notes
you will need from inside places DAs and applications can't be invoked.


%% Shareware $12 -- miniWRITER -- DA

The only free/share text editor I know with word wrap, so it's
irreplacible for entering new text. Limit of 30k in a file under edit
(but can browse a 30k chunk of a larger file in readonly mode), but 30k
is quite enough for entering new text. I'm using it to type in the text
for this very file, for example. It has no paragraph fill (it has a
break-every-n-character command but it doesn't do the correct thing about
paragraphs, you get spaces at the end of many lines etc.), so when you
get done entering your text you copy&paste to another editor (MicroEmacs
or McSink/Vantage) if you then want to convert your
very-long-lines-that-wrap into filled paragraphs. Conforms nicely to Mac
user interface as a DA. Edits only one file at a time, but you can cheat
by getting two different versions and installing both as DAs (if you have
another DA slot available) and then you can edit one file with each. This
program is ideal for entering new text, and I use it routinely hours a
day.


%% Shareware $25 -- FlashWrite ][ -- DA

Not a text-file editor since it edits its own resources, not external
files. Seems to be an upgraded version of FlashPad, but is only a DA, not
a HotKey, thus can't be called from inside choose-file dialogs etc. like
FlashPad can. Starts with just one page and lets you add as many pages as
you want, each with a user-defined user-changable title. Pages are stored
in alphabetical order in the menu; if you rename a page it gets moved to
its new alphabeticl order. Each page is a resource of up to 30k, and you
can have a different font on each page. You can edit only one page at a
time. Has word wrap. Warning, unlike text-file editors, you can't save
your edit when you want to, so it's dangerous to use when entering new
text. As best as I can figure out, it saves the current resource (page)
whenever you change pages or close the DA (at least that's when I hear my
hard disk churning). This program is ideal for keeping notes you need to
keep handy, indexed by keyword (page title), but if a page gets large it
takes a long time to swap it in when you select that page, so it's best
to keep pages well under the 30k maximum.


%% Shareware $45 -- McSink -- DA

No word wrap. Lots of menu items from Vantage present and not grayed but
give you an advertisement for Vantage if you try them. Paragraph fill to
configured width (user-settable) or to current window width are fast and
work properly, so this is great for reformatting your text for various
non-word-wrap editors after you've used miniWRITER for initial entry.
Allows editing multiple files, each in its own window. (I tried making
more than sixteen windows and got tired myself before it reached its
limit if there is any.) Scroll bar works correctly even on files so large
Edit 2.0d1 doesn't scroll properly. But because it loads data to memory
it is limited by the size of your RAM, so you may still need Edit 2.0d1
to edit extremely large files. When it does run out of memory, it's very
nice about it. Sometimes it has to discard its undo copy of your file,
but then after warning you it retries the command. Sometimes it runs out
of memory while trying to load a new file and just aborts that file
without crashing the rest of your edits in progress. The only annoyance
is if you're editing a file almost at its maximum limit, nearly every
paste command you do invokes its discard-undo-copy warning and you can't
get any effective work done with all those interruptions. Saves your edit
to disk very fast, like 30 times as fast as Edit 2.0d1. But for only four
dollars more you can buy Vantage mailorder, which claims to have word
wrap and lots of other nice features, so probably best to try McSink for
a while and when you're ready to send in your shareware fee, order
Vantage instead.


%% Finale

I've been a bit too verbose here. What I want to do is prune these
descriptions down to the bare minumum of what features are present or
absent in each program and what size file or resource each can
effectively edit, and have separate files giving detailed reports on
features and bugs of each individual program.

The author can be contacted for the next few weeks at:
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
and for a longer time at:
Robert Maas, PO Box 6641, Stanford, CA 94309
VoicePhone: 415-969-2958
and possibly also on some public bulletin boards in the San Jose area:
408-249-7916 (RealmOfWonder) [e-mail]
408-245-7726 (DarkSideOfMoon) !apple!uuwest!rem or <[e-mail]>


%% End.