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