Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

Which text editor do you use for dos programming? (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 08.05.2013, 15:49

> Up to now, under DOS, I've been using 2 kinds of text editor : the standard
> "EDIT" and the one included in RHIDE (for DJGPP).
IIRC, FD EDIT supports 80x25 (all?), 80x43 (EGA), 80x50 (VGA), at least (8x16,8x14,8x8 fonts). Usually people only prefer *.CPI (or *.CPX) fonts for their 8-bit NLS needs, otherwise default is sufficient. You may have to use VESA to get beyond 80x50. And there are apparently many other 8-bit console textmode fonts.

setmxx
loadfont
setlines
svgatextmode

> The main drawback of these editor is that they are displayed in (default)
> text-mode, which is efficient but displays only 25 lines * 80 columns, in
> standard (bios) font.

FD MODE can be used to switch to 80x25,80x28,80x43,80x50. Most well-designed apps either directly support such mode changes or let you enable it yourself (e.g. "fed blah.txt -43").

Are you just wishing to use higher resolution or different glyphs or edit text in different encodings? E.g. Mined or GNU Emacs should be good, if you can live with (relatively) limited console 8-bit textmode fonts.

> As this kind of display can be appropriate with old 14" CRT, on today's
> screen (19" or more), it would be better to display more text...
> Is there a solution for this ? Some kind of text editor that would display
> in graphic mode (for example 1024*768), with several fonts and size ?
Blocek is graphical and has Unicode support. (AFAIK, you have to be graphical to support huge fonts like those needing various Unicode glyphs, most of which is for CJK anyways.) Though keep in mind that an appropriate font [glyph? typeface?] has nothing to do with text encoding. You can edit Unicode in a pure 7-bit DOS interface, just maybe not as comfortably.

> In other words, is there some kind of "notepad++" for Dos ?
Georg's FLWriter 1.2 tried to be some kind of graphical word processor. Unfortunately, for me at least, it seemed to crash a lot (esp. open file dialog). It had some fonts and such things like bold, underline, etc. It more or less preferred XHTML but could partially convert between a few others (RTF, PS).

As mentioned, if you need a word processor, that's totally different, esp. regarding (programming) text editors. I don't know of any good, full-featured, free/libre word processors for DOS. As I mentioned recently on freedos-user, I found WP2LateX, a converter to LateX (TeX, METAFONT, etc, whatever). So I guess you could do it manually by hardcoding markup in TeX or whatever and use that to produce .DVI, .PS, .PDF, etc. There are LateX modes in some editors (e.g. GNU Emacs, JED).

Regarding programming editors, most people prefer VIM or GNU Emacs. Both of those have DOS builds but may not be exactly what you want if you're wanting to support lots of human languages as, obviously, you'd need graphical + fonts to show more than 255 glyphs at once. (Neither of those, AFAIK, has a graphical DOS build.) Blocek is far superior in this manner, but it lacks the various add-ons, plugins, scripting, etc. that those editors offer, though if you can live with an inferior interface with those, you can still edit almost anything.

RHIDE is basically a dead project. I don't know where Robert Hoehne is, but I don't gather that he's worked on it in years. It was based upon SETEDIT and the *nix C++ port of Turbo Vision. (SETEDIT still seems to barely be kicking. Latest actual version is from 2010, but he seems to only provide lots of *nix binaries these days. I don't think he's officially updated the DOS binary since almost nine years, e.g. 0.5.4.) The latest RHIDE binary I know of is Andris Pavenis' unofficial build circa 2005 called 1.5c. It allegedly can't be compiled with anything newer than G++ 3.3.6 (and uses GDB 6.3). I'm not sure its debugger supports anything beyond COFF very well, and COFF basically doesn't work (much? at all?) with GCC 4.5.x and newer (though GDB 7.6 has been ported to DJGPP, which works well with DWARF, but RHIDE is too old, I guess).

So what would I suggest you use?

For just random text editing, use whatever you like. I prefer TDE, mostly from habit, because it does most things I need. I don't personally like DOS EDIT (or clones), but for small stuff it's okay.

For programming stuff, again, use whatever works. There are billions of text editors, even for "obsolete" platforms ;-) , so you should have plenty to choose from. Most savvy people seem to love VIM. Others like GNU Emacs. Others prefer various others, e.g. Joe (or Jupp), JED, FED, FTE, VILE, DOS Navigator (etc.), etc.

For multilingual text editing, I suggest sticking with Mined or Blocek, though GNU Emacs 23.3 (DJGPP) is fairly good, if you can live with it.

For word processing, dunno, it's too complicated. Most people would suggest using a modern OS with a modern suite of tools (e.g. LibreOffice, Abiword, Ted, Lyx, Texmacs). But I don't really do word processing (and apparently there are a bazillion formats and other worries there), so I have no real answer.

Post reply
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
22762 Postings in 2122 Threads, 402 registered users (2 online)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum