spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger) (03/15/86)
I realize this is probably the umpteenth time someone has asked for this, but here goes: Does anyone have or know sources of the vi and emacs text editors for MSDOS on an AT&T PC6300? Any leads at all will be appreciated. Thanks! Steve Frysinger 201/386-7010
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (03/17/86)
In article <730@bonnie.UUCP> spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger) writes: > Does anyone have or know sources of the vi and emacs text >editors for MSDOS on an AT&T PC6300? An excellent vi clone is available from Custom Software Systems, in Shrewsbury, MA, (617) 842-1712. I've been using it for about 2 months now, and it's almost exactly vi version 3.7 (that's the last termcap version.) It is a re-implementation, and seems to have different bugs. Cost is $149 qty 1, and right-of-copy (including manual) is $75, so you can get several at $75 each after the first one. The one minus to the DOS vi is that it uses termcap and ANSI.SYS rather than writing directly to the screen memory. We all know how slow ANSI.SYS is, and how incomplete it is. Operations that require insert/delete line/char don't work, so you get slowopen/noredraw; this means @'s as placeholders for deleted lines, and no redraw of the tail of a line when you're inserting until after you hit ESC. Scrolling with ^U acts like ^B. CSS recomments a replacement for ANSI.SYS from Hersey Micro Consulting, in Ann Arbor, MI. (I don't have a phone handy.) They have a thing called FANSI-CONSOLE, which has more features than humans can possibly stand, some of which have something to do with being an ANSI.SYS substitute. (It does keyboard macros, for example.) FANSI speeds things up considerably and supports a bigger set of ANSI escape sequences, so with TERM=fansi, vi is much more pleasant to use. FANSI costs $25 as shareware, with variations involving whether you get a manual, quantity, etc. Given the time delay in ordering via AT&T, it's best to place a PO to both places at the same time. I'm still waiting for my official copy of FANSI, with a complete manual. (The shareware disk comes with half the manual on the floppy.) In effect, for $100/person, you get vi for DOS. This is worthwhile if you have a hard disk, although vi is slow to load from floppy, as it's about 120K. Vi works fine on a 6300 plus, but FANSI-CONSOLE won't work on mine. It hanges after echoing one character. This is similar to a bug in the 6300 which FANSI can program around, but appparently the program- around for the plus is different. One other minus to FANSI, it emulates the IBM BIOS. This means that if you use a feature that's unique to AT&T's BIOS (such as 400x600 super-high- res mode) it won't work under FANSI. Hersey is aware of the problem and won't give a date for having a fix. I was one of the authors of vi, and I'm happy with this clone (although it bugs me that return acts like j and not like +, I haven't been annoyed enough to put a map command into EXINIT.) I am not, however, related in any way to CSS or Hersey, other than as a user. Mark