xiaofei@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (05/17/91)
Infotex.tex ftpable from prep.ai.mit.edu has a ^Z in the middle of the file. However msdos uses ^Z as end of file. Any msdos editors I tried, microemacs && freemacs && vi1.4 && WP51 fail to read the complete file. Any solutions ?
JOHNGALT%UACCIT@ARIZONA.BITNET ("Dr Galt, I presume?") (05/19/91)
On Fri, 17 May 91, in Message-id: <9105170411.AA15400@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu> xiaofei@acsu.buffalo.edu said: >Infotex.tex ftpable from prep.ai.mit.edu has a >^Z in the middle of the file. However msdos uses >^Z as end of file. Any msdos editors I tried, >microemacs && freemacs && vi1.4 && WP51 fail to >read the complete file. Any solutions ? Yes, two quick and cheap solutions, and a comment to the later message about how wonderful BRIEF is. 1. Get Qedit from your favorite FTP site. wuarchive.wustl.edu is a good one. Qedit will read in the entire file even after a control-Z. It is also an excellent and very fast text editor that costs a lot less than BRIEF and blows it away in speed. 2. Use debug to change that particular byte to something else, like a space. (That is, if you have debug.) Another method is to use some sort of utility with a sector editor. They are available from MACE and NORTON. There may even be shareware sector editors. Now, Flame ON! I have used the last couple incarnations of BRIEF. I now use a variety of other editors depending upon my needs. BRIEF is a disk hog and is very slow. It is not easily portable, meaning that you can't just slap it on a floppy and go. It uses a huge amount of environment space to keep track of its customization. (Why not a config file??) Search and replace are slooooow. Scrolling is also slooooow. In the last version they did upgrade the extention language, so it is a LOT easier to write extentions to the editor. However, execution of these is slow. Maybe I am just spoiled by the fact that freemacs is probably an order of magnitude faster. BRIEF may be able to handle the control-Z problem, but it chokes on nuls and other control characters. The keyboard has some unusual mappings to start. (What do YOU normally expect the "insert" key to do?) Support is not up to par (but then what "professional" product has decent support anyway? I should say, EXCEPT TGV Multinet which has the best support anywhere!) The newest BRIEF upgrade, for $75 (!) basically only includes mouse support and the "redo" capability. And besides, who in their right mind REALLY likes to use a product called "BRIEF" by UnderWare, Inc.???? Flame OFF. Now, on the other side of the coin, BRIEF is a VERY capable editor. It has a very complete extention language. It can edit large files. (freemacs can handle 64k files and qedit can handle files as big as your RAM.) There are at least two sets of editor extention macros, the commercial dBRIEF for editing dBASE programs, (Is anyone still using dBASE? oops! ;-) ) and a public domain set of macros to emulate the "vi" editor, which at last count, didn't seem to be complete. If anyone is still interested in my opinion, after this "blast" of one of MS-DOS's supposed sacred cows, I use freemacs for an extensible editor. (I use it all the time for TeX.) Qedit for the medium duty stuff, for instance, if I go consulting. It fits on one disk, and has good macros and great speed. And for editing large files, or something that I want to have exact control over (for instance, binary files), I use "PE", the program editor that comes from Word Perfect. (It's the only thing from WP Corp that I'll use!) If anyone has other suggestions on editors, I would love to hear them. Send them to me personally, to keep the traffic on info-tex down to a dull roar. Thanks. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % "Dr. John Galt" Internet : johngalt@ccit.arizona.edu % % University of Arizona BITNET : johngalt@arizrvax % % P.O. Box 3328 Voice : (602) 623-5444 % % Tucson, AZ 85722 % % % % These are absolutely my own opinions! I take sole and full % % responsibility for them. (Sort of like children, huh?) % %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%