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1993-11-11
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Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: s_walter@irav1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Baetzler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Edge text editor version 1.704
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 12 Nov 1993 05:44:23 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 429
Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <2bv7rn$3ad@menudo.uh.edu>
Reply-To: s_walter@irav1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Baetzler)
NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu
Keywords: text editor, ARexx, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Edge 1.704
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Edge is a very customizable and very configurable text editor with
powerful ARexx support.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
* USA
Name: Inovatronics, Inc.
Address: Suite 209b
8499 Greenville Avenue
Dallas, TX 75231-2499
USA
Telephone: (214) 340-4991
FAX: (214) 340-8514
* UK
Name: Inovatronics, Ltd.
Address: Unit 11, Enterprise Center,
Cranborne Road,
Potters Bar,
Hertfordshire 8N6 3DQ
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 707 662861
FAX: +44 707 660992
* Germany
Name: Inovatronics GmbH
Address: L|tticher Stra_e 12
53842 Troisdorf-Spich
Germany
Telephone: +49-2241-40 68 56
FAX: +49-2241-40 67 73
E-mail: inovatronics (BIX)
75300,61 (Compuserve)
inovatronics (Portal)
LIST PRICE
Sorry, I do not have information about the list price handy. The
going price was DM 100.- at the Cologne World of Commodore.
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
1 MB RAM is required.
An accelerated Amiga (higher than 68000 CPU) is highly
recommended but not required.
SOFTWARE
AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher is required.
It is assumed that ARexx is running on your system.
COPY PROTECTION
None.
Edge can either be run off the original disk, or installed on a
hard disk.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
My test setup includes:
o Amiga 3000, ECS chipset, Kickstart 3.0, Workbench 3.0.
o 2 MB of Chip and 8 MB of 32 bit FAST Ram.
o Picasso II graphics card with 2 MB RAM installed.
o Piccolo graphics card with 2 MB RAM installed.
INSTALLATION
The supplied Installer script will copy all necessary files to a
directory of your choice. The full installation takes up about 800 KB of
hard disk space.
ABOUT THIS REVIEW
First of all, I have to mention that these are my first impressions
of Edge. I have just played around with it a few hours, and so my opinions
might yet change considerably. I'm planning to release a full review in a
few weeks after I have familiarized myself well enough with the product. In
the meantime, please feel free to mail me your comments and observations
about Edge.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Why first remark upon seeing Edge was, "Why yet another editor?"
After all, there's CygnusEd, TurboText, GoldEd, DME, and dozens of
others - is there really room for one more? The answer is plain and simply,
yes. Edge has no radically new features, but it manages to incorporate all
the good features of the other editors. It can be totally customized to
your liking and your needs. Like you'd expect from a OS2.x application, you
can select fonts and colors of your liking, and have it run on the Workbench
or a user selectable screen in any resolution. You have complete control
over menu layout and functions, so you can easily extend Edge to do whatever
you want. Configurability even goes as far as to allow you to change
keyboard and mouse button definitions.
It's got "unlimited" Undo just like CygnusEd, and it's got folding
like TurboText. If you wanted to, you could make it look and behave just
like either of the two.
Edge is a very powerful tool in the hands of the experienced user.
To use it to its full extent, you should be familiar with ARexx or at least
with programming in general. Customizing Edge takes some guts once it gets
beyond redefining preferences, requester texts and general menu layout. The
average user will probably satisfied with the features the plain Edge has to
offer.
SYSTEM CONFORMANCE
Edge's general layout adheres basically to the Style Guide rules set
up by Commodore. It uses GadTools gadgets and (if you desire) ASL
requesters, which then can be redirected to the requester library of your
choice. The text scrolling doesn't use hacks to obtain extra speed, and
consequently doesn't interrupt serial data transfers. It also works just
fine on redirected Picasso and Piccolo screens.
Still, Edge isn't as stable as it should be. In the course of this
test, I have managed to crash the program once or twice. However, I have
been reassured by Inovatronics that they intend to stamp out every bug they
can get a fix on.
SCROLLING
Speed is something most users expect from a powerful text editor.
It has to be responsive to input to be usable. Edge delivers in this
department, at least on the A3000. The scrolling speed is configurable, and
can easily set to approximate that of your favourite editor. However, with
horizontal scrolling there seems to be no provision to specify a scroll
width. If you move against the right scroll border, the whole display just
scrolls one character to the left. I could not get Edge to do jumps of
several characters width, which would mean that horizontal scrolling would
occur less often (see the BUGS section, below).
Fast vertical scrolling using shift cursor up or down is a bit jerky.
I, like many CygnusEd users, love the way CED produces a still legible
display in this mode.
EDITING FEATURES
Edge provides all of the usual Copy, Cut and Paste functions... but
twice! One set of the functions operates on a local buffer that is private
to each display, and the other uses the system Clipboard.
Cutting and pasting of columnar blocks is also supported, and it's
blindingly fast! I took a massive 511 KB text file of about 8500 lines, and
cut the first column, and it took Edge all of 10 seconds to copy it to the
Clipboard. With CED, such an operation takes several minutes! Reinserting
that block where it belonged is maybe as fast, but I wasn't able to verify
this with text cut to the Clipboard, since Edge inserts that text above the
old text, and not where it belongs. Later on, I found out that this is a
limitation of the supplied menu file, which doesn't give the user a menu
with the appropriate "PASTE CLIP GLOBALCOLUMNAR" entry.
Search and Replace operations work on about the same scale.
MACRO RECORDING
The ability to define macros on the fly is the hallmark of the truly
powerful editor. With Edge, all you do is select the appropriate function,
choose a key to bind the macro to, and right then the recording starts.
Until you stop the macro recording, every action in the editor is tracked
and recorded as an ARexx program. This means that you could use the macro
function to create a skeleton ARexx program that you could extend later on!
However, in the current version of Edge, there are some caveats. It
is completely possible to type in recursive macros, even without bad
intentions! Just imagine you wanted to redefine the return key to insert
two returns instead of one: the straightforward way would be to select
return as the key to bind the macro to, and then to hit return twice.
However, during execution, this leads to (at least theoretically) endless
recursion. If you're quick on the uptake, you can hit ESC in time to bring
up a command requester to execute "hi", which forces all currently running
ARexx programs to halt immediately. All you have to worry about then is the
batch of "ARexx execution interrupted" requesters that will pop up.
I'm also still searching for a way to revert a macro key definition
without reloading the whole keyboard setup.
FOLDING
Another power-feature is text folding. Edge lets the user define
special fold marks that encapsulate the text to be folded. However, those
marks must be placed in the first column of the text to be recognized. The
line the fold start marker is in is not folded away, but remains visible.
This provides an easy way to label a fold.
Hiding and showing of folds can occur at three levels