geoff@suneast.uucp (Geoff Arnold) (07/10/86)
I'm curious to learn if anyone out there is using the
Turbo Editor Toolbox from Borland, and if so what their
experiences have been. Does anyone know of a similar
package for C?
--
"disclaimo, disclaimas, disclaimat, disclaimamus, disclaimatis, disclamant"
UUCP: {hplabs,ihnp4,nsc,pyramid,decwrl}!sun!suneast!hinode!geoffericksen@unc.UUCP (07/19/86)
I recently bought Borland's Turbo Editor Toolbox, and i can't say i'm
real pleased with it. What you get is basically two editors, with Turbo Pascal
source code (compiled code is also on the 2 disks): FIRST-ED, which is in fact
the "Toolbox", and MS (MicroStar), a more sophisticated editor. What you
don't get is useful stand-alone text-editing subroutines which you might
include in your own application.
One of the reasons i bought the package was to have an editor (for
editing source files) which was smaller and faster than WordStar. Sorry ---
MicroStar totals 80k of disk space (main program + command overlay + message
file, just like WordStar) compared to WordStar's 90k, not enough of a
difference to be worth changing. And reading a file into MicroStar is SLOW!!!
FIRST-ED is smaller (60k total), but is too limited (and buggy) to be
considered. Even MicroStar has some bugs (such as not being able to handle a
file containing tab characters) that i don't want to have to live with.
Sure, i could spend the next 3 months rewriting the code, but i have more
interesting things to do.
The 244-page manual contains some interesting very general information
about text editors, along with some trivial examples of how to modify the
Toolbox editors, and a summary of the routines in the Toolbox (arranged
alphabetically --- with an alphabetical index following, no less --- which
doesn't help if you want to know how to open a new window, for instance).
It gives you NO documentation (other than a command summary full of misprints,
with the corrected version on one of the disks) for the editors themselves.
I'm not even sure what the editors can do; i inferred from the documentation
that MicroStar allowed editing two files at once, but (after a lot of playing
around and looking at the source code) i now believe that this is not true.
I hadn't really intended to write such a scathing review, but i'm
writing this on my PC using MicroStar and getting sufficiently annoyed by
its idiosyncracies. On the good side, you can open two windows on the screen,
EMACS-style (although the lines taken up by MicroStar's status area don't
leave you a lot of space for multiple windows). And the pull-down menus are
at least impressive-looking.
Incidentally, i'm running MicroStar on a Sanyo MBC-550 semi-compatible.
It took a bit of hacking to get the Toolbox running on a non-IBM-compatible
machine; but fortunately all the screen output goes through a single inline
machine-language routine, so it wasn't too difficult. Interestingly, the
Toolbox screen output routine is essentially the same as the Turbo Pascal
editor's, so that after porting the Toolbox to the Sanyo it was very easy to
get the IBM-specific version of Turbo up on my machine too (i had been using
"generic" MS-DOS Turbo).
I figure i'll try to work with the product for a few more weeks, after
which i may take Borland up on their 60-day money-back guarantee. In the
meanwhile, i intend to get PC-Write and see whether it's closer to what i'm
looking for.
--
Jim Ericksen
UNC Chapel Hill