Article-I.D.: cvl.786
Posted: Thu Aug 29 09:00:09 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 07:59:54 EDT
References: <1067@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: Computer Vision Lab, U. of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 119
>
> Has anyone tried this out on a computer? Is it worth $30?
>
1. I am sorry that this is so long.
I have been using the MIX editor now for about a month
on a Morrow MD3 Z80 CPM system. I decided to order it over
the telephone after reading a review of the editor in
net.micro.cpm. These are my impressions after using the
editor for a month.
First of all, the service was fine. The woman who took
my order on the telephone said the editor would arrive in 5
or 6 days via UPS, and sure enough, it was here.
I immediately proceeded to run the terminal setup pro-
gram (SETEDIT.COM, I believe) to create the setup file
SETUP.EDT which is used by the editor. This is were the
problems began because the entry for the ADM 31 in
setedit.com is not correct. If you select the ADM 31 and
write a text file instead of the binary file for the editor
(different menu selection in setedit.com) you will see that
both DELETE LINE and REVERSE SCROLL are "ESC-E", whereas
REVERSE SCROLL should be "ESC-E CNTL-K". This took some
time to track down, but with the text file I could edit the
changes and actually add the insert character features (and
so forth) for my terminal that are not in the setup file.
Now the fun begins. I can now enter the editor and
edit text files, and view the nice help files. These are
really kind of cute, since the help files show the functions
broken down by category and the keys they are bound to.
Since I have had enough of Wordstar (the original key bind-
ings for the MIX editor) I immediately began to write a
setup file for EMACS-like key bindings. This was much
easier to do than I expected. I started around 8:00 PM and
was finished by 11:00 PM, plus the two hours it took to get
the terminal configuration correct. I can safely say that
in one evening I got the editor set up the way I wanted it.
I cannot say that I am entirely pleased with the pro-
duct however. There are two problems with the MIX editor
that I have encountered over the past month. The first is
how the editor handles tabs. The use of tabs is toggled by
the command "BC" or "blank compression." Tabs are expanded
when the editor comes up, and using the command "BC" will
then compress the blanks into tabs. The problem is that if
you happen to have a single space exactly in a tab column,
the editor will replace the single space with a tab. I
found out the hard way by editing a section of my thesis at
home and then downloading it to school for typesetting. In
a 3 to 4 page section this happend 168 times. The problem
with leaving blank compression off is that all the tabs are
replaced by spaces which is ok for my thesis, but not for
the source to Modem 700. I was editing Modem 700 which is
152 K with tabs and with blank compression off, I found
after exiting the editor that the source was now 220 K.
With 384 K disks, I could no longer edit the dumb thing and
keep a backup on one disk. This is what started the whole
mess and prompted me to use blank compression on mode, but
as you can see that does not do the trick. I really do not
believe that a single space in a tab columns should be
replaced by a tab character. This seems to be a bug in the
editor.
The second problem is related to the "JL" or join line
command. I found that if two windows are open, and if a
line is being deleted in the top window, the line of "+++++"
that separates the two windows is deleted and cannot be
replaced. This is more of an annoyance than anything, since
with the separator line gone it is hard to tell if there is
one window or two. The other complaint with "JL" is that
when the text from below is moved up, there is still white
space between the text. It is as if the newline is replace
by a space, and then the screen is redrawn, but I cant be
sure.
This has been long enough, and I hope my comments are
of some value to someone. My impressions of the MIX editor?
I consider the problem with tabs to be quite serious, not
just an annoyance. Once the tab problem and the other minor
things are fixed, I would have to rate this editor as an
excellent value. The multiple window and macro capabilities
have proved to be extremely useful. I had no trouble writ-
ing macros and the new key bindings to make MIX look like
EMACS. That is more than I can say for EMACS. If anyone
has read this far, and would like my EMACS-like MIX setup
file, just send mail.
- Stanley Dunn
Univ. of Md. Dept. of Computer Science
Univ. of Md. Computer Vision Lab
seismo!umcp-cs!smd (preferred while cvl is being moved)
seismo!umcp-cs!cvl!smd
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