[A83] Re: Tasm Line Numbering
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[A83] Re: Tasm Line Numbering
There are hundreds (probably thousands) of editors available. Assembly
Studio 8x has a nice editor, not to mention a great assembler and awesome
help files. I highly recommend anyone doing z80 programming for calcs use
that.
MS-DOS Editor is nice, if you are on DOS or a Windows 9x machine. I used to
use that editor for everything (sad, I know) since my 8088 days in
QuickBASIC. That is one thing I missed when I started using Linux and
FreeBSD regularly.
You might try an editor like vi (try vim) or emacs, although they will take
some getting used to. Many people swear by them, and the debate between vi
and emacs is a textbook example of something that starts a flame war. I
don't care for the bloat of emacs, and I don't have time to learn how to use
it. The plus side to emacs is that it's practically it's own OS, and you
can do everything in it (edit, check your mail, browse the web, compile
code, make coffee, etc.). The downside is that it has the bloat that you'd
expect to such a tool (emacs = emacs makes a computer slow). It's almost
Microsoft-ish in the sense that it has every feature under the sun (I'm sure
RMS would love to hear people say that).
vi is usable (vim is a version of it that has nice features like syntax
highlighting), but I don't care for it. It is a modal editor, meaning it
has different modes. You can't move the cursor around and edit text at the
same time. It does have some advantages because of this. It's command line
makes it easy to search or replace text, jump around, and do all sorts of
other things. I think that the keys are layed out incorrectly for a
standard PC keyboard. You end up hitting the escape key all the time. On a
tradition unix keyboard (like a real vt100), the escape key is in the place
of the backtick / tilde, and the control key is in the place of caps lock.
The Happy Hacking keyboard puts those keys in the correct spot, but for the
$70 for the USB version, I'd take my USB Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro
(most comfortable keyboard I have ever used). I don't see why a traditional
modeless editor can't have an optional command line interface, and I intend
to experiment with this idea in my editor. It's nice to know the very
basics of vi, like inserting/deleting a few lines and saving a file, since
if you're working on a random unix box, vi is about the only editor that it
is certain to have.
I use JOE for a console editor on unix platforms. I believe that there is a
DOS version too, and it probably compiles fine with Cygwin. The editor
actually has different modes. I use the default mode. There are modes to
specifically emulate wordstar, pico and emacs. It is a modeless editor,
like the DOS Editor or a normal Windows editor, so it's easy for beginners
to use it. However, it has a lot of nice features, far more than the DOS
Editor. Due to limitations of unix terminals, things like text selection
isn't as easy as just shift-arrows, but it's not bad once you get used to
it. All the commands are either ctrl-something, alt-something, or ctrl-k
something. This makes it really easy to do things like search and replace,
go to line, etc., without taking your hands off the home keys. However, it
does this while still being user friendly, unlike vi. I highly recommend
trying this editor, if you are looking for an editor that you can use
everywhere. I am basing my editor on JOE's look/feel and functionality.
Unfortunately it doesn't have syntax highlighting, lacks some features I'd
like, and has a horrid code base. This is why I decided to write my own
editor.
People new to unix usually like pico, since it's on most unix's in the
normal setup. Everyone doing CS at UNM was given a shell account on AIX
boxes, and everyone in the beginning classes were encouraged to use pico
(heh, try getting someone who is learning programming to learn vi at the
same time). Due to the license, pico isn't in Debian. Instead, there is
nano, a GPL'd clone of pico. The pico interface is very similiar to joe or
the DOS Editor, and it's nice if it's the only alternative to vi, but I
would recommend joe over pico, because pico has far fewer features. pico is
part of the pine mailing software, and is intended to be the editor for
email. As such, it doesn't do a whole lot more than is necessary to edit
email.
There are plenty of editors available for X Windows. I suggest trying out
Glimmer, a very nice Gtk based editor written by Chris Phelps, a fellow TI
programmer. It has an interface like most Windows editors, plus a lot of
nice features like syntax highlighting (even z80). It has some issues that
would keep me from using for everything, but I was talking to him the other
day about them, so hopefully a later version will have those features.
Being that it would replace both HomeSite and C++Builder's editor for me,
that is quite a compliment.
Currently, HomeSite is my prefered editor for HTML and PHP, or anything web
related. C++Builder's editor rocks for C/C++ editing, and I use it anytime
I'm editing C/C++ on a Windows box. As I said before, hopefully Glimmer
could replace both of those for editing, giving one more reason to use Linux
more often.
If you want a Windows editor and don't like Assembly Studio 8x (and why
wouldn't you like it?), then do a search on softseek.com, and I'm sure that
you can find an editor that you do like.
> >Why don't you just use an editor that shows what line you are on? I
don't
> >see the purpose of this silliness.
>
> Which editor other than the msdos editor?
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