More On Text Editors

Reading through Tim’s article on text editors in QHJ #13, I found that his list of editors available on the QL was far from being complete. That is why I would like to add the following to his overview.

SEDIT by Ralf Redoendt of Dilwyn Jones Computing

A small and fast editor written in compiled SuperBASIC and assembly language. SEDIT is commercial but there is a free demo version. Under the Pointer Environment, SEDIT can be cloned, ie. several copies run from the same version. SEDIT does not require any system extensions.

DME

Thanks to C68, this powerfull editor has been ported from the Amiga. Similar to MicroEmacs, DME is a very large, fully programmable, can edit multiple files and is free. DME is much faster than MicroEmacs and has even been further improved over the Amiga version.

QD by Jochen Merz Software

QD, now at version 5.x, is a commercial editor for the QL and much different from all the others because it is using all the latest improvements to QDOS to the full: Pointer Environment, Things, Menu Extensions, Button Frame and more.

The advantage is not simply a graphical user interface, optionally mouse driven, at the cost of increased memory requirements and reduced editing speed. QD is able to exploit higher screen resolutions due to the use of the Pointer Environment. This is important for those poeple who are using one of those Atari emulators with Extended MODE 4, it’s successor, the QVME caard which gives up to 1024×1024 pixels resolution at four colors (provided you can pay for the monitor) for the Atari range of computers, the QXL card (Miracles 68040 QL to be pllugged into PCs) that will be able to support higher resolutions with future driver releases or the forthcoming so-called Graphics Card, another QL machine from Miracle. The QD window can be resized and repositioned at runtime.

From version 5 onwards, QD has a much improved Thing interface, allowing other programs to control the actions of QD, you could even write your own commands for QD – if you are very good at machine code programming.

QD does not support editing multiple files but it is not necessary because you can run several QD jobs from the same piece of code in memory. All the usual editor commands are implemented in menus and the more important ones can be called by short key presses.

Other Editors

There are even more editors but I have only heard of them resp. saw them from a distance at QL meetings: ArcEd from Cowo Electronics (Switzerland), the editors supplied with GenQL assembler and Computer One programming languages.

Myself, I am using QD except for large files which QED loads and edits much faster.