#Need KILLER ASCII Editor
26 messages in this thread
I have been looking for a good, cheap, readily available text editor for
DOS that will allow me to edit ASG MNU files – without screwing up the
format.
I have already tried QEdit, Norton Editor, WordPerfect, DOS 5.0 Editor.
Each of these packages seemed to miss the mark.
As you may know, the ASG.MNU file that Partner assembles is around 1.3K. I
need an editor that will allow me to edit it without forcing line wrap
while at the same time loading (or providing access to )the entire file.
(Even Partner does not let you edit the default tablet menus without having
the "wrap" problem. It has a limit of 200 characters.)
ASG says they use an editor named BRIEF. Any information? Other
solutions?
Thanks for the help!
sw
Steve,
Brief is a truely awsome editor, I use it all the time. However, to the
best of my knowledge, 512 characters is the max line length, and must be
configured to do that. It is also fairly expensive. You did not give
Norton editor a fair shack. There is NO need to have word wrap. It can be
turned off, and saved in an off condition. I know of no line length limit
in Norton. Norton Editor is also much less expensive. Give Norton a second
try. In fact the older version, may be considered (by some) even better
than the newest version.
Kevin
I did find Norton to be the "best" editor of those I tried. I have word
wrap disabled and am able to edit one of our smaller ACAD.LSP files that
has a single line of 7000+ characters without any problems. None of the
others would do it! The problems is editing a huge file with long lines,
too.
Steve:
You might try out a program here on the forum call WCEDIT. It was designed
specifically for editing menus and lisp files. The copy here on the forum
is a time restricted demo, but I think the registration fee for the full
working copy is well worth the money.
Mike
Thanks. I'll take a look at WCEDIT.
sw
You guys may find this silly, but I still use Wordstar v4.0. It's
written in assembler (fast), allows lines and files of any size and length,
has most of the features of more powerful word processors and has a ASCII
mode. I've tried all the ones you've mentioned and more, yet I always come
back to Wordstar.
Ted
Steve, for my money, I've found the best text editor around to be POINT
which used to come FREE with the old Logitech mouse. It can handle 999
characters per line and open multiple documents in a windows fashion. If
you can dig up a copy, it will be well worth the trouble. Good luck, Pete
Karaiskos
WCEDIT didn't all that great a write-up in PC Magazine recently. Something
about a steep learning curve.
Paul,
Ok. I'm really getting tired of the knocks….I'm moving WCEdit
to SHAREWARE . No time outs. I'm also going to offer a special for
,30 days ONLY!, for $50.00. Watch for it. As for the learning curve,
it will be drastically reduced. I'm really pushing for a fast upload
to lib 9, so keep your eyes on it.
Walt
Gee, Walt… do you think if we bug Malcolm enough, he'll move AutoCAD to
shareware? <GRIN>
Dave
<g> … perhaps as low as 50.00!
Paul – may I jump in? I'm the guy that reviewed the text editors for PC
Magazine. My review of WCEdit was a little more enthusiastic before they
edited it. It *is* harder to learn than most of the others, but it also does
a heck of a lot more than them too.
The editors at PC Mag kind of homogenized everything into their own style,
taking off some of the edges in my reviews of the weak editors, as well as
rubbing off the highlights of the best ones.
I made editor's choices, which they chose not to use, and picked CADMagic and
WCEdit for the ADS editors, and Cadet for non-ADS.
Dave
Dave, which issue was that again? <sheepish grin>, I must have missed it!
Didja review QEdit, huh, didja? Just nosey….
Brian
Brian – Feb 11. Main feature was 486-33s.
It was a two part review on AutoCAD utilities. David Cohn <BIG LETTERS> did
the intro and the first part on drawing viewers and I <teeny letters> did the
part on *AutoCAD* text editors. No QEdit, Brief, Norton, WP Office Editor…
it was strictly about AutoCAD-specific text editors.
Lessee, now… WCEdit, Ketiv Editor, CADMagic, Easy Word, Easy Edit Plus,
Marcomp Text and Attribute Editor, AutoSE, Textools and Cadet.
Dave
🙁 Brian.
Steve,
I've tried all the files you mentioned… and I *love* QEdit. What I did
was to chop up the MNU file into managable pieces, each about 100K. Then i
wrote a one-line batch file to copy+ them together. Since the order of the
parts doesn't really matter, I arranged it to suit me: pops, screen, tab1,
2, 3, 4, submenus1, 2, 3, 4, iconmenus. In this way I simply edit the part
that I need to and recombine them.
To create the parts, I loaded as much of the MNU as I could in QEdit, and
since you can't save a partially loaded file (nor load the rest of it), I
wrote out blocks as needed. Then using EDLIN, I loaded the file again and
deleted the first several thousand lines (which I had blocked out already),
appending as I went, until I had a truncated remainder of the file which
QEdit would load.
If you didn't want to go through this half-hour exercise, you could try to
get GEdit, by Gazelle the makers of QDos 3 (which comes with GEdit). Oh
well, this was one way of doing it! <g>
Brian
The best editor in the world is Kedit by Mansfield Software.. It
will use ENS XMS etc and allows line lengths up to 2048. Real fast and
uses a subset of REX for its' macro language.
Mike
Brian,
If you are using R11 of AutoCAD, why would you want to shell into
a 16 bit editor? I would suggest you use WCEDIT which DOES NOT shell!
It is 32 bit and very fast. It is specifically designed for AutoCAD.
If your interested, let me know.
Walt
The idea of cutting the MNU file into pieces is exactly how ASG creates the
assembled menu. I am able to edit each of its "pieces" with Norton without
any problem. The Partner program then writes the assembled ASG.MNU file
into the 1.3Mb (did I say 1.3K before?) monster. I would like to access
the assembled beast as a single file, and make some cosmetic edits that I
am unable to find the "source" files for.
Thanks for the help. I'll try to find out more on GEdit.
sw
You could try the Kedit or better yet, WCEdit (Walt's pushing it… he
needs the moral support)…<g>
Brian (I ain't got no problems working with teeny pieces…)
Give me an idea of what you're trying to edit and I can tell you where to
look.
Originally, we wanted to replace all occurances of ^c^c in the ASG.MNU with
^c^c (ASAVE) . This routine checks all command selections, and if the
proper amount of time has passed, an automatic save of the file is
performed. The workaround we now use is to make these edits in the .TB1
files. When Partner builds the menu, it incorporates the changes. This
works well.
The specific edit I want to make is in the first line of the screen menu,
when the menu is originally attached. Because we have a number of
project-specific versions of ASG.MNU, each with a unique name (i.e.
ASG-PROJ.MNU), it is helpful if the screen menu validates that the proper
menu is attached. Search as I may, I have not been able to find the source
of this.
Steve
Steve:
BRIEF will handle the task, but QEdit should have done it as well. Also,
WCEDIT (available in demo form here on the forum) is worth looking into.
Larry
I've used PCWRITE (and the LITE version) to edit ACAD menus and .lsps.
$9.00 at the $3.00 Software outlets.
At ASG we use several editors, depends on the person's preference. Brief
and Norton are used by several programmers. My personal choice is
Multi-Edit.
Fred
Fred,
Is the editor contained in Partner going to be modified to allow editing of
lines over 200 characters? A lot of the lines in the basic .TB* files
exceed this limitation. Currently we are running the version of Partner
shipped with ASG Core 2.5/9. Please let me know if this is fixed in the
new 5.0.
Steve