Post by @dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 4 days ago

Been doing some research on a text editor for the VIC-20. Named: VIC EDITYPE.

https://vidakovich.itch.io/vic-editype

https://retro.social/@permacomputer/117222312816732484

Was confused for a good long while about how to get back to the menu after composing a new file, and a little trip through the user's manual allowed me to bind the menu key to @ instead if £.

There is power to BASIC, this text editor requires about 6 or 7 kilobytes of free RAM only.

This editor can centre text, and some other simple editing tasks.

#retrocomputing

itch.io

VIC EDITYPE

This mini word processor for the VIC lets you cut, edit, and save text to tape.

#retrocomputing

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'(vidak) _(:3」∠)_

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 3 days ago

Research has continued on VIC EDITYPE, for the purpose of writing a more idiomatic ~5KB Tiny BASIC text editor.

The intention is to publish this under the umbrella of the peoples @permacomputer project.

The way text entry works is straightforward.

Editing is a little crude, you step through each line of the text file with the letter F, and then correct the line with the keyboard letter C.

#retrocomputing #permacomputing

'(vidak) _(:3」∠)_

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 5 hr. ago

@permacomputer VIC EDITYPE BASIC text editor research log.

I have been studying the core loop of the program.

What happens is a tight loop around:

120 GET C$:IF C$="" THEN GOTO 120

And then after we test for special menu characters, we echo the character, using a semicolon to prevent a newline:

PRINT C$;

then a little later, append the character to the line:

A$(K)=A$(K)+C$

And that's the magic for NEW mode, where the user composes their text.

#retrocomputing #permacomputing #devlog

'(vidak) _(:3」∠)_

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 4 hr. ago

@permacomputer here is a video i promised of the text editor working on the VIC-20 inside an emulator.

a video showing off the workings of EDITYPE for the VIC-20. the word wrapping seems to work quite well for this type-in BASIC text editor!

Ƶ̗̥̎ POP2kr

@snufkin_vc@mastodon.social 4 hr. ago

@dirtycommo @permacomputer great job! 💪

It seems you could move the old cursor to the next line before continuing so it doesn't lingers? I'm not sure how that works on the VIC

I think you are going to love this book "Software Tools in Pascal": https://archive.org/details/softwaretoolsinp00kern

By the end of it you should have the editor that inspired GNU ED!

$ info ed
> GNU ed is based on the editor algorithm described in Brian W. Kernighan and
P. J. Plauger's book "Software Tools in Pascal", Addison-Wesley, 1981.

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Ƶ̗̥̎ POP2kr

@snufkin_vc@mastodon.social 4 hr. ago

@dirtycommo @permacomputer have you tried describing the algorithm it in terms of pseudocode? like

first the building blocks, read a byte and print a byte.

Then read a line (the most basic editing is just delete and arrow keys, jumpt to start and end of line)

Then multiline editing using the line editor.

Finally or at some point paging, the way I see it is pager+readline=editor :)

old forth editors don't even have a pager alla' unix, it just reads another block and edit inside that range.

'(vidak) _(:3」∠)_

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 4 hr. ago

@snufkin_vc @permacomputer yes i have! i am trying to transpose this into a type of BASIC that is less bound to the VIC-20 and Commodore BASIC trappings.