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

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 11.08.2013, 04:48

(Sorry for bumping this old thread.)

> > In other words, is there some kind of "notepad++" for Dos ?
There are a million different text editors to choose from, even for "old" DOS. It just depends on what you need or expect it to do.

> I tend to use Vim on every platform. In native DOS it works fine, but it
> seems too slow in emulators (ie DOSEmu). Especially more recent 7.x
> versions. So an older version or Elvis (another vi clone) usually do the
> thing.
Though there are better editors with more features, I tend to prefer TDE or VILE. In particular, I'm so used to using TDE from years. VILE is nice too, but usually I only prefer it in environments where TDE doesn't work as well (e.g. keyboard input bugs/limitations: Linux X11 native and VirtualBox + FreeDOS).

Vi and Emacs clones are everywhere, and there are many. However, some are better supported than others. Elvis never had a 32-bit build for DOS (due to lack of time and interest from author). 2.2 was horribly crippled memory-wise, and 1.8 was better but wimpier in features. (Well, most people don't "only" want a pure vi clone without extensions.) At last check, you could actually run the Win32 version of Elvis 2.2 under HX (with only minor screen redrawing issues), which is better, but I still prefer (native DJGPP) VILE.

GNU Emacs (viper) can emulate vi, but it's a lot more heavyweight. IIRC, it was like 180 MB installed (full, with docs and .el and .elc files). I think I slimmed it down (23.1?) to about 12 MB (without viper?), but I don't recall having many extras.

> As Vim is a bit bloaty on DOS, I would recommend an older version for
> non-fans (5.5+ has syntax highlighting, 6.3 might be better choice).
It depends if you want omnicomplete (code completion, or whatever), spellchecking, folds, syntax highlighting, etc. It's not that bloaty, but it is much bigger than just a simple vi clone.

> Other editors I find usefull are for example: fed, fte, jed, tde... Aurora
> is a nice "formerly shareware" editor. OpenWatcom includes a pretty nice
> vi-like editor.
JED is mostly an Emacs clone, though there is a partial emulation for vi in some website online. Though Slang hasn't really caught on with most people (though probably no worse than VIMscript).

FTE and TDE actually share some code (also from older DTE).

OpenWatcom's vi is nice for its syntax highlighting, menus, and it's 8-bit clean.

> For editors without syntax-highlighting.. There are bunch of them. I tend
> to use only the lightest like PC-Mag ted variants (actually ted2
> derivatives as it has support for Unix line endings) or an old vi clone
> called Calvin. Vim also has a pure 16-bit version. It's nice, but without
> fancy features of 32-bit version. An older version might have more options.
Calvin doesn't support regex, but Stevie and Xvi do.

Vim 7.1 was last to support 16-bit DOS, and it was a bare-bones build, so it lacked most features.

Here's the real news (but bad news, no surprise):

"[2013-08-10] Finally, after more than a thousand patches, there is a new version of Vim. This is mostly a bug-fix release. Also, many runtime files have been improved, syntax highlighting and indenting works better."

"32 bit DOS executable vim##d32.zip vim73_46d32.zip
Not available for 7.4 and later."

:no:

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