CopyMem Quick & Small released!

[Thorham]

Lol at Vim (68k AOS).

[Fats]

Don't get me started on "Microemacs" which, while it shipped on the Workbench disk, was barely usable either.

Don't dare to say anything more bad on (micro)emacs or I'll turn this thread in a classic emacs vs. vi war thread. And if you think the infighting on amiga.org is bad; I assure you you ain't seen nothing yet...

I suppose "vi" is somewhere in the sweet spot of being quick to launch and (given enough available brain capacity) quickly allows you to commit keystroke sequences to muscle memory. Yes, it's a weird design, but so is the standard keyboard layout. If you learned touch-typing, it's amazing how well you can use that weird layout at great speed. It doesn't work quite so well with more heavy-weight editors such as the original "emacs".

I've been told that the weird design was actually thought through: it was to reduce the risk on mechanical typewriters with the next letter getting stuck on the returning previous letter.

[psxphill]

I've been told that the weird design was actually thought through: it was to reduce the risk on mechanical typewriters with the next letter getting stuck on the returning previous letter.

well there are two reasons listed on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History_and_purposes
 
 reduce jams and trying to distribute letters evenly.

[Thorham]

Don't dare to say anything more bad on (micro)emacs or I'll turn this thread in a classic emacs vs. vi war thread. And if you think the infighting on amiga.org is bad; I assure you you ain't seen nothing yet...

On 68k AOS that's irrelevant, because the mighty FrexxEd destroys all

[paul1981]

Don't you just love it (not) when Ed gets its knickers in a twist and trashes the top line after saving? Whenever I edit anything with Ed, I always make sure to leave the top line blank or use a ';' just in case it decides to trash it.
I like BED (Blacks Editor).

[Thorham]

Why use Ed at all?

[matthey]

Back in the early days of Amiga programming (that would have been 1987/1988 in my case) it was hard to find a decent programmer's editor.

I knew "Z" but quickly discarded it for being too obtuse. Funny that the Aztec 'C' documentation gave it such prominence, stressing the fact how compatible it was with "vi". I think the defining sentence in the documentation was "if you know vi, then you know Z", which works the other around, too, but not in Z's favour: I didn't have a clue what the documentation was talking about in the first place ("vi"? was that a roman numeral or something? and what does the number six have to do with text editors anyway?) and had to conclude that whatever the authors were so excited about probably wasn't for me.

People seem to forget the history and how everything that wasn't assembler was related. We have BPTRs in dos.library which I believe came from the BCPL language?

BCPL -> B -> C

The Amiga was one of the first affordable computers to use C for most of the OS and it was a common development environment. The 68000 chip made it easier to use a high level language which was popular on non-affordable hardware (the 68k is a cheaper successor to a VAX and PDP-11). This was another important choice in foresight by Jay Miner. The Amiga and Atari ST helped make C popular even though most computer people would think C came from the PC where it was slow to catch on or Unix which is partially true but rare outside universities and a few big businesses at the time. Dennis Ritchie, Jay Minor, Carl Sassenrath and even RJ Mical were pioneers and innovators that few people know about today while Steve Jobs and Bill Gates get the glory for being good at marketing inferior products.

Why use Ed at all?

Because it is free (with AmigaOS), available and works. Ed was at one time not too bad. It has powerful ARexx support and the menus are configurable so maybe it was the FrexxEd of the day? I did a lot with Ed and ARexx but the vanishing 1st line bug and the slow speed finally killed it for me.

I went to CED 3.5 and then CED 4.20 where I am now. CED is fast and very powerful but not perfect either.

o I wish I could change the menus to be more style guide compliant like Ed .
o I wish all major bugs were fixed before moving to a payed upgrade. I shouldn't have to pay for bug fixes or upgrade to get bug fixes. CED 4.20 has 2 major bugs. Some files will not load and this seems to have something to do with the path and file name to the file. The other is the tab size changing when using an ARexx script which can be worked around by restoring the tab setting with ARexx after an ARexx script. These are very annoying bugs even though they don't cause data loss. I have installed the patch from Aminet which didn't fix the problem.
o I wish there was a 68020 compiled version. It's amazing that CED is as fast as it is when SAS/C uses a branch to a branch because there is no 32 bit branch on the 68000. A multiply or divide can take several times longer without 68020 MUL/DIV instructions. That SAS/C memory copy routine is less than spectacular also. Fortunatly, the good algorithms are more important than optimal compiler code generation.
o I wish an "editor" wasn't so expensive to upgrade and the process easy (my CD has no serial number).

The Amiga has many good editors now like CED, GoldEd, FrexxEd and BED. There are better free editors on Aminet now than ED, sometimes with source code.

[bbond007]

When I used "vi" for the first time (that must have been around 1991-1992; I never used a Unix system before I went to university), I was puzzled by the fact that some of the control sequences were exactly the same as in "Ed".

same here. I used 'ed' for editing text files on Amiga years before experiencing 'vi' on Slackware Linux. Even then I started using 'joe' which I preferred over 'vi' even if it was similarly familiar. 'joe' is similar to WordStar (or so I have heard - only used WS a few times)

For a while I was using xwpe under linux which was a excellent clone of Borland's 'turbo' IDE...  

In my opinion CygnusED is the best on Amiga

[itix]

Don't you just love it (not) when Ed gets its knickers in a twist and trashes the top line after saving? Whenever I edit anything with Ed, I always make sure to leave the top line blank or use a ';' just in case it decides to trash it.
I like BED (Blacks Editor).

Me too. I have used BED about 20 years now. I have used it so long that using any other editor on Amiga has become difficult to me.

I tried to contact author long time ago to get source code but unfortunately he was not willing to share.

[Thorham]

Because it is free (with AmigaOS), available and works.

Didn't just about every version of the OS come with MEmacs?

I went to CED 3.5 and then CED 4.20 where I am now.

Yeah, CED. Used to be my favorite, until I wanted more features and found FrexxEd.

I wish an "editor" wasn't so expensive to upgrade and the process easy (my CD has no serial number).

You could use a free editor. What does Ced do that free editors don't?

The Amiga has many good editors now like CED, GoldEd, FrexxEd and BED.

Never did understand why people like GoldEd. I tried that thing once and ran away screaming.

In my opinion CygnusED is the best on Amiga

It depends on your needs and what you want. CygnusEd is a little on the simple side for me now. Just the other day I was thinking about NotePad++'s nice multi line editing feature, so I added it to FrexxEd with a simple script. Hard to beat that kind of power.

[guest11527]

Didn't just about every version of the OS come with MEmacs?

Yes, but that didn't make it any better.  

Never did understand why people like GoldEd. I tried that thing once and ran away screaming.

Because you can configure it to your liking. In fact, once you know how to handle it, you could configure it for an entire IDE. In my personal configuration, I compiled from it, installed compiler settings, makefiles, jumped to errors in the source file and much more. It was a very powerful editor, and for Amiga business, I still use it.

Version 4 was something I never liked, though, simply because it did not integrate into the Look and Feel of the Os. Dietmar apparently had the idea that he could do something "better than the Os". While some of the gadgets and handlings were indeed "better" in some sense in revision 4, they broke with the traditions of the AmigaOs. For that reason, I never bothered to upgrade. I was happy with revision 3.

Nowadays, I'm mostly happy with emacs, also customized, even though I never tried to customize to the same extend as I had Golded customized.

[Thorham]

Yes, but that didn't make it any better.

It still seems better than Ed at least. Then again, it's hard to be worse than Ed

Because you can configure it to your liking. In fact, once you know how to handle it, you could configure it for an entire IDE. In my personal configuration, I compiled from it, installed compiler settings, makefiles, jumped to errors in the source file and much more. It was a very powerful editor, and for Amiga business, I still use it.

What I hate about GoldEd is the fact that it has a weird editing model that I can't stand. I like things to work like Ced and Notepad++ (standard editing model). FrexxEd does that, and offers full programmability. You can play Tetris in that editor. I also hate how CubicIde uses Lisp as it's scripting language. Terrible! FrexxEd uses FPL which is just a C interpreter.

The big drawback of FrexxEd is that it's default setup isn't all that great.

[olsen]

I also hate how CubicIde uses Lisp as it's scripting language. Terrible!

Well, it worked for Emacs

Should you wake me up in the dead of the night, stressing that the fate of the world depended upon me instantly adding scripting language support to an application, I'd probably start yawning, make coffee and write a Lisp-like language interpreter.

With the exception of "Forth", there's probably no other type of programming language which is both robust and powerful, and as easy to implement. Whether this necessarily translates into a language which empowers the user or just succeeds in making his life harder is up for debate.

Sometimes it's enough just to make a system scriptable which wasn't scriptable before.

[Thorham]

Well, it worked for Emacs

Just that is reason enough for me to never use Emacs.

Should you wake me up in the dead of the night, stressing that the fate of the world depended upon me instantly adding scripting language support to an application, I'd probably start yawning, make coffee and write a Lisp-like language interpreter.

Or you could get Lua, and add that. Seems a lot easier than writing a script language from scratch. Not to mention that Lua is a lot nicer than Lisp.

With the exception of "Forth", there's probably no other type of programming language which is both robust and powerful, and as easy to implement. Whether this necessarily translates into a language which empowers the user or just succeeds in making his life harder is up for debate.

Lisp is probably quite usable once you're used to it. The question is whether you want to get used to it or not. I certainly don't.

Sometimes it's enough just to make a system scriptable which wasn't scriptable before.

Why not just add a nice language? Best choices for a script language seem to be Lua or a C interpreter.

Lua is easy, and easy to add if you're working in C. It's also pretty fast, works well on old systems like lower end 68k Amigas (68020/30), and very portable (SASC compiles it properly).

Adding a C interpreter is good, because many programmers know C. That's why FrexxEd's script system is so nice. If you know C, then you know FrexxEd's script language.

[guest11527]

It still seems better than Ed at least. Then again, it's hard to be worse than Ed.

Well, look at Z. Or vi for that matter. This is worse. But anyhow, being better than Ed is really not quite a challenge. Yes, memacs was better, on a very low quality scale, though. I looked at it once, maybe twice, then put it away. I used ed for the startup-sequence. Worked. That's the best I can say about Ed.  

What I hate about GoldEd is the fact that it has a weird editing model that I can't stand. I like things to work like Ced and Notepad++ (standard editing model). FrexxEd does that, and offers full programmability. You can play Tetris in that editor. I also hate how CubicIde uses Lisp as it's scripting language. Terrible! FrexxEd uses FPL which is just a C interpreter.

I don't remember what was so particularly strange about it. Maybe I configured it to behave less strange. I worked on it again over Christmas, for some old Amiga stuff, and it was still quite good. I'd wish emacs had be less of emacs and more of ged, but that's too late now.

I don't even remember which editor I used in the old days when I did a lot of in assembly. Really a lot. I looked at seka, and had to p*ke about its user interface (or lack thereof) and decided against this primitive beast (a good decision), then used the Databecker "Profimat", which had a somewhat useful IDE, though a pretty limited assembler (not a good decision). Luckely, decided against the GFA assembler (I also used GFA Basic quite a bit, fast but buggy) and bought DevPac (2.0 back then), never regretted it, it was a decent choice. I believe I used the DevPac editor for quite a while, still a good thing. Then with Lattice C, I believe it was LSE, which had a couple of bugs, but still worked quite ok. Then came GoldEd, SAS/C and DevPac 3.0, again good investments. I guess I was never a particular fan of CED, but I already had good editors for what I needed. GED I used for almost everything, C, Assembler, PasTeX. Except for the Startup-Sequence. That was still in the hands of "Ed" because GED was a bit too bulky.

[olsen]

Should you wake me up in the dead of the night, stressing that the fate of the world depended upon me instantly adding scripting language support to an application, I'd probably start yawning, make coffee and write a Lisp-like language interpreter.

Or you could get Lua, and add that. Seems a lot easier than writing a script language from scratch. Not to mention that Lua is a lot nicer than Lisp

Sometimes you don't get to choose, and there are overriding constraints which spell out in so many words why we can't always have nice things.

I've been in that position several times, and although I don't recommend the approach, it can make great sense to explore the boundaries set by the constraints and use that playing field to the best of your ability.

That can lead to wicked strange solutions which you'd rather not admit having cooked up in a moment of weakness, but then sometimes the overriding constraints are what guide your decision-making and not that nagging conscience of yours that keeps reminding you that the choices you are forced to make may not look so good in the long run. Being a programmer can suck.

Sometimes it's enough just to make a system scriptable which wasn't scriptable before.

Why not just add a nice language? Best choices for a script language seem to be Lua or a C interpreter.

You don't always get to choose. The last time I was really upset by the choices made in a scripting language design was when I had to write something in AppleScript to clean up my iTunes library. What a bizarre language. Why is Apple holding onto it, and its equally bizarre ecosystem? Because that scripting language, and all the ideas that went into its design, has been around for decades with nobody willing to admit that it doesn't hold up well.

Lua is easy, and easy to add if you're working in C. It's also pretty fast, works well on old systems like lower end 68k Amigas (68020/30), and very portable (SASC compiles it properly).

Adding a C interpreter is good, because many programmers know C. That's why FrexxEd's script system is so nice. If you know C, then you know FrexxEd's script language.

I think that Lua's a decent enough design, which is both powerful, well-documented and something newcomers can learn and apply. It's also embeddable with a small memory footprint. I once came close to using it in one of my applications, but then time constraints made me - wait for it - knock off one of those Lisp-like language interpreters instead (the fate of the world didn't exactly depend upon it, and if it did I didn't notice, but sometimes you just want to finish a project and not keep on tinkering).

As for using a 'C'-like language for the purpose of scripting, I can see the attraction for programmers who are already familiar with the language. For everybody else it's a long and ardous journey to even become competent in using the language, so I wouldn't want to force it upon anybody.