[net.micro.mac] QUED Review

burnard@lll-crg.ARpA (David Burnard) (12/05/85)

A Quick Review of QUED (QUality Editor for Developers) 

Cost: $65
Available from:

	Paragon Courseware
	4954 Sun Valley Rd.
	Del Mar, CA 92014

	Tel: (619)-481-1477

I've been using QUED (extensively) for about three weeks now in
the final stages of preparing the examples disk to go along with
our book ("Using the Macintosh Toolbox with C"). Here is a brief
summary along with my initial reactions:

Features:

	MDS Edit Compatible
	Entirely memory based (~350K available on a 512K Mac)
	Continuously displays available memory
	Remembers user customizeable configuration
	"Cursor" Keys + Word-forward/back commands
	Delete char/word to right/left of cursor

	Undo Command!
	Horizontal & Vertical Scrolling
	Scroll inactive windows w/ Command Key
	Split-screen editing ala Microsoft Word
	"Auto-Save" option (arbitrary number of keystrokes)
	"Ramdisk" option (saves to ramdisk & floppy simultaneously)
	"Backup" option (creates backup version before saving)
	Command keys used in SFPut/Get Dialogs 
	   (ie. Command-D to switch disks, Command-E to eject disk)

	Auto indent
	Case changes (UPcase, downcase, Changecase) for selections
	Case in/sensitive searches
	Optional Search/Replace across all open files
	Optional Line number display
	Jump to line# command
	Synchronized scrolling between two windows

	Number of open files limited only by available memory
	Automatic window Tiling/Stacking
	Double-click to resize window to full/former size

	CUSTOMIZEABLE Transfer Menu
	CUSTOMIZEABLE Parenthesis Checking 
	   (user specifies which chars/sequences to monitor, 
	    ie. {}, (), /* */, "", etc.)
	Coke-bottle character stripper - removes unwanted control chars

	plus others...

Features from MDS Edit not found in QUED 

	Align command
	Transfer to application and pass current file (ala Finder)
	Command-D to open file whose name is hilighted
	Automatic transfer of selected text to Find command
	Confused screen mode (a "feature" of Edit)
	   (I'm sure we all know and love this one)


   First of all, I use QUED as part of my Mac C based development 
system. I also have a Paradise 10Mb (adding a 20Mb soon) hard disk.

The first thing I did was attack QUED with ResEdit and FEdit so that
the rest of my system would think that it really was MDS Edit. Alot
of it was probably unnecessary but I wasn't too crazy about the icon
they used for text files. Now everyone (including me) is happy. The
only thing I miss is being able to start up the Compiler/Linker/Exec
from the editor with the name of the file in the frontmost editor.

   Actually this shouldn't be too hard to implement, and since 
   you can already customize the items in the transfer menu, this
   would really add to the versatility of the product. Yes, I 
   will forward this suggestion to Paragon.

C and the Linker now restart the editor with the appropriate files
when an error occurs. 

The new features I make the most use of are: Auto-save, Paren Matching
UNDO (thank goodness), Global Search/Replace, Multiple (more than 4)
open files. All in all I'd say this is a substantial improvement over
Edit, then again the cost of Edit is pretty low since it's included
in most development systems. 

I'm not sure whether auto-save would be an annoyance on a floppy based 
system, but on my Paradise, even with moderate length (8-15K) source 
files it's barely noticeable. Besides, if you don't like it don't 
turn it on, or at least decrease the frequency of auto-saves.

Well that about exhausts my feeble fingers, if anyone has further
questions mail to me and I'll try to answer.

					Dave Burnard
					burnard@lll-crg.ARPA