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Aucb.846 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Mon Apr 5 14:08:57 1982 line-at-a-time editors >From Admin.JQJ@SU-SCORE Mon Apr 5 14:06:02 1982 There are in fact two styles of full-screen editor available for IBM equipment. One, discussed in several previous messages, is basically a page-at-a-time editor heavily utilizing the particular terminal's local editing and block-mode transmission capabilities. Examples of such an editor include the IBM program products (actually, some of these are user-supported program products) such as Edgar, XEDIT, etc. Since these typically run only on 3270-like terminals, the standard pattern is to have a 3270 emulator running on a front end to perform screen management (rather than, as some contributors have suggested as a better alternative, a front end performing all file-editing services).

However, there is another trend in the IBM world as well, towards "display" editors that do use line-at-a-time I/O, do *not* require any local editing capabilities in the terminal, but correspondingly do not have very many "immediate" commands beyond BS during character insertion. One advantage of such editors, of course, is that they can more easily support a wide variety of Ascii terminals, and have their understanding of the particular terminals more hardwired into the program (thus improving update optimization, since the program presumably knows its intentions better than would a separate screen-manager front end). Another advantage is that they can feasibly be run over slow phone lines (e.g. 1200 baud, or split speed 1200/150), and over packet-switched networks where the cost of full-duplex single-character packets, not to mention the unacceptable echo delay of full-duplex, makes both Emacs-style remote editing and Edgar-style local editing unfeasible. One good example of this latter style of program is Cornell's XEDIT (different from the IBM XEDIT; I think Cornell has changed their name to avoid confusion), which runs on a wide variety of Ascii terminals.

I suspect that CC.Korner really would like one of this latter style of editors (since his original request for information specifically mentions the wide variety of local terminals), and one written to run on a CYBER system rather than on IBM equipment. Can anyone help him out? If not, does anyone have a good line editor (Wylbur, perhaps?) written in a high level language? -------

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