knudsen@ihwpt.ATT.COM (mike knudsen) (10/15/87)
First let me say that I've used a graphics workstation and laser printer to make a pretty good "cheat sheet" for the SCRED editor supplied with OS/K and the optional Coco Level 2 Developer's System. If you want one, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Mike Knudsen 1411 E. Wakeman Ave. Wheaton, IL 60187 (If you're with Bell Labs, just mail free to IH-6B-338). Since I have the new Dynastar and the old TSEdit, I haven't used SCRED beyond a trial run or two, but based on careful reading of the manual and experience with other editors, my feelings are: GOOD & BAD POINTS about SCRED: * Can edit files too large for memory (like Dynastar, unlike TSEdit). Unfortunately you still have to tell the command line #mmK to get mm Kbytes of RAM instead of the default buffer size, which is pretty small (just like TSEdit). * Can save current state of your file and keep on editing. * Can insert other files and write out parts of the edit buffer. * Has Cut/Paste buffer with versatile command set. * Allows "Undo" but only on one line (however, deleting multiple lines puts them in the paste buffer, so you can paste them back). * Definitely a "Mode" editor -- like TSEdit, SCRED has Insert and Edit modes that you have to ping-pong between. Personally I dislike modes (so I use EMACS and Dyna), but others prefer them. There is also a 3rd Command mode, which is equivalent to the ':' prefix commands in TSEdit or the ^N menu in Dyna. * To add to confusion, the Search and Change commands are duplicated in Edit and Command modes. A convenience, once you get the slightly different names straight (send for my cheatsheet). * Cursor-motion and some Deletion commands are assigned to keys by location, joystick-style. Other commands are by mnemonic letters. [In my cheatsheet I've made up a few names that are more mnemonic than in the manual.] * Using a single key (^K) to alternately go to beginning and end of current line is a neat trick that deserves to be copied. * SCRED lacks all the different ways of moving the cursor around in context that TSEdit has (like "go to next 'T'" or "delete up to next '('"). Of course these are luxuries. * Lacks the balance test for (), [], and {} as found in TSEdit. Too bad, this feature is what keeps TSEdit on my system disk. * Everything is very line-oriented, including Cut/Paste. The manual says to split lines into two or three lines if you want to cut a phrase out of the middle, etc. Splitting is easy (^B). * Search strings use '?' as a wild-card to match one character. Nice, but I wish they had '*' too. Also an initial Blank anchors the search to beginning of line. * Line numbers are not displayed, but you can say "G nn" and go to line number nn. Handy for assembler and compiler error messages. * I don't know yet whether you can quote (using ^V) the newline character in search and replace strings. Few 8-bit editors can, EMACS can. This is a very handy feature for finding empty lines, anchoring searches to end or beginning of lines, adding lines, etc. * There is no way to insert or recognize real TABs (^I), despite what the manual says. Must be a bug. OS/K users, how well does your version work? Haven't tried SCRED on files with real tabs from other editors. * You can quickly set tab stops (simulated with blanks) at every N columns. But you can't set individual tab stops as in Dyna. * There are no document-formatting functions like paragraph filling. There is an auto-indent (to match previous line) mode, great for us C programmers. * On-line Help menus are available by pressing '?'. These work well. * You can hit one key to start continuous scrolling of the text up or down, pausing and restarting with the space bar. Very nice depending on how smoothly your screen or terminal handles this. * SCRED automatically does a GETSTAT and adjusts to whatever size window (on Coco 3) you're using, up to full 80x24 and including old 32x16. You could have several SCREDs going on the same screen! Due to its terminal heritage, SCRED does not use overlay windows. * SCRED uses the now-standard /DD/SYS/TermSet file to customize its cursor operations to your screen or terminal. The manual tells how to set up new entries for this file. * Not bulletproof! SCRED uses ESCape for several things. Since this is ^BREAK on a Coco, it's very easy to type BREAK instead of ESC. Once in a while is OK, but about the 3rd BREAK SCRED hangs up the whole system--you can't even change windows with CLEAR. Lookit the 3 Stooges, type "DOS" ... Maybe re-map these keys! * If I remember right, SCRED is pretty big, about 32K, so 32K is the most data RAM you can use. But remember your file can be bigger. Was SCRED written in C? Summary: SCRED isn't sensational, but it's OK and plugs some feature gaps in the competing editors. If you have it you don't need anything else, except a word-processing formatter. -- Mike J Knudsen ...ihnp4!ihwpt!knudsen Bell Labs(AT&T) Delphi: RAGTIMER CIS: <memory failure, too many digits> "Just say NO to MS-DOS!"