Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: bmccnnll@unix1.tcd.ie (Barry McConnell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: TurboText Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 11 Jun 1993 02:18:54 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 252 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1v8q2e$khv@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: bmccnnll@unix1.tcd.ie (Barry McConnell) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: text editor, ARexx, commercial PRODUCT NAME TurboText, version 1.03 (08 June 1991) BRIEF DESCRIPTION Text editor. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Oxxi, Inc. Address: P.O. Box 90309 Long Beach, CA 90809-0309 USA Telephone: (213) 427-1227 FAX: (213) 427-0971 PRICE I picked it up for 35 UK pounds at the Amiga Shopper show in London last year, but I don't know what the current price is. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: US list price is $99.95, with mailorder prices around $60. - Dan] SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Runs on all Amigas. 512K RAM and 1 floppy drive required. SOFTWARE Requires at least Kickstart 1.2 and Workbench 1.3. COPY PROTECTION None. Installs on a hard drive. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING I tested the program on an A2000 with a GVP 120MB HD, in both 68000 mode (3MB RAM in total), and with a 68030 (11MB RAM in total). I tried it under AmigaDOS 2.04, 2.1, and also 3.0 on an A4000/040. REVIEW About one year ago, I tried out a demo version of this product. I was so impressed by it, I knew I just had to buy it. It complies fully with the Commodore Style Guide, and it's very professional-looking. It also contains a huge number of features and is very stable. Initially, TurboText opens its own custom screen (or public screen under AmigaDOS 2.0 and higher). You can choose whether you want a low, medium, or high-resolution display, and in 2 or 4 colours. You can run TurboText on the Workbench screen. It uses simulated GadTools gadgets under all AmigaDOS versions, which is OK for 1.3 users (who don't have GadTools), but not for anyone who has upgraded. For example, TurboText doesn't use "real" cycle gadgets, so PD programs like CycleToMenu can't affect them. It uses the Topaz 8 font for all requestors (except the file requestor) and a user-selectable (non-proportional) font in the text edit window. The file requestor is not the standard ASL one, although it is similar and reasonably fast. You can have as many windows open under TurboText as you wish, and you can also split one window into two "views" to edit two parts of the same file at once. Also included in the package is a programmer's calculator (with hex, binary, and octal options, along with rotate and shift operations), but this is severely crippled in that it is integer only. It can be called from a menu and run on the TurboText screen, or used as a stand-alone calculator from the Workbench. You can open a window that shows the hexadecimal values of the characters around the cursor (and of course edit your file this way), and there is also the ability to open a console window (Shell) on TurboText's screen. All the standard editing facilities you would expect are present, including clipboard support, load/save/print clipboard, mark/paste vertical blocks (neat!), find-and-replace (with limited pattern-matching), and bookmarks. Extensive ARexx support is included, along with the ability to record keystroke/menu macros on the fly and save them in files as ARexx macros. The editor also supports "folds", whereby you can collapse the currently-selected block of text (e.g., a procedure in a large C program) to a single line so you can effectively see more of your file at once. This is similar to the collapse/expand feature found in outline processors. You can also convert blocks of text to upper or lower-case, as well as center and justify lines of text (or whole paragraphs). There are three Preference windows. "Display Prefs" allows you to choose your screen mode, screen size, font and colours. "Edit Prefs" handles the way text is entered: word-wrapping, right margin, TAB width, overstrike, etc. And finally, "File Prefs" allows automatic creation of backup files (name "template", how many, and auto-save delay) and other file-related features. TurboText may also be customized using definition files. These allow you to specify what every keypress does. For example, you might want ALT-RightArrow to move the cursor to the end of the line, or CONTROL-Delete to delete a single word. You can also create or modify the menus using the definition files. Some vendors supply definition files to interface TurboText with their applications. For example, I know SAS/C V6 comes with a new definition file to allow you to compile a program from within TurboText, then cycle through all the errors at the touch of a key (interfaced through ARexx to the SAS/C package itself). Needless to say, this is an invaluable tool. An additional (tiny) program is included with TurboText, called TTX. This program allows fast startup of the editor by checking to see if TurboText is already resident in memory, and if so, passing it the name of the file(s) you selected, saving the time that you would normally spend waiting for the main program to load. If TurboText is not already running, TTX launches it. TTX also accepts the same ToolTypes as TurboText. This means you can, for example, place it in your WBStartup drawer with "NOWINDOW" and "BACKGROUND" ToolTypes. Now, every time you reboot your Amiga, TurboText will be silently loaded into memory (if TTX can't find it in the search path, it checks the assignment "TurboText:"), and when you double-click on a text file (with its Default Tool set to "TurboText:TTX"), it will load pretty much instantly. TurboText also installs some hotkeys in the system. Control-Alt-W by default will open up a new window, ready for editing. Even if your Amiga is tied up doing something else (e.g., Workbench is copying files from floppy, and you don't have a Shell handy), you can still instantly get a new TurboText window, even if there are none currently open! (This is what the "BACKGROUND" ToolType is for - it doesn't unload the program when you close the last window.) Control-Alt-U will unload the program once the last window has closed, and of course there are more hotkeys. These hotkeys are user-definable in the definition file. DISLIKES In an effort - presumably - to combat fragmented memory situations, when TurboText loads a file, it is read in in small chunks. (I think it reads approximately 100 lines at a time.) For small files, this is not a problem; but if you are a sysop who regularly edits 1.5 MB nodelists, it is a real pain. A rival text editor, ASDG's CygnusEd, reads the entire file in one go, which is basically instant if you have a fast hard drive; but of course this won't work if you don't have one continuous block of memory free for the file. I would like the option to increase the size of TurboText's loading buffer. Contrary to the operation of most word-processors, TurboText uses a double-click to mark the start of a block of text, and a single-click to select the end. This is fine if the block stretches across many pages (since you can then use the scroll bar to move to the end), or if you need to use a "Find" requestor to find the end; but it is a bit confusing initially when you just want to select a single word or line. I would like the option of drag-selecting text. I recently used the ARexx macro facility of TurboText, and it needs a bit of improvement. For example, I wanted to convert a line of text in the following form: comp.sys.amiga.reviews 394 ...to: Assign comp.sys.amiga.reviews: UUNEWS:comp/sys/amiga/reviews DEFER Now, this is possible using a (complicated) ARexx macro, but it is not exactly terribly fast. I think it took about two seconds per line on a 68000-based Amiga, and certainly processing a 2000-line file in this manner took something like 15 minutes on a 25MHz A3000. (In case you're interested, I copied the newsgroup name, pasted it (inserting "Assign", "UUNEWS:", and "DEFER" where necessary), jumped back to the previous ":" using a Find request, then searched forward for "." characters, replacing them with "/", until I found myself on the next line.) A more serious problem is the handling of aborting ARexx scripts. This is done by clicking on the close gadget of the window (which gives you the standard "Close without saving changes?" requestor). Now, I _have_ gotten this to work on occasion (e.g., with the sample "Towers of Hanoi" script that comes with TurboText). But for the application I described above, for some reason clicking "OK" halted the script but left the window on-screen, chewing up CPU time! (As if it was executing an infinite loop.) Now, the multithreaded nature of TurboText allowed me to work on other files despite the "crashed" window, but it did slow down the whole machine. I haven't investigated this too much, but it seems like a bug. Another problem I have is when I switch from TurboText to another application: say, the communications package Term. After a while, Term appears to have stopped accepting my keypresses (it can take some time to detect that it is a local problem, since you initially think it's the remote modem at fault). In actual fact, the problem is TurboText has opened an "Autosave?" requestor back on its own screen, made that the current window, but failed to move its screen to the front. Since Term - when opened on a public screen - does not have a window which will visibly deselect, this all happens without alerting the user. The find-and-replace algorithms - while still blazingly fast - are not quite as nippy as CygnusEd. There is also no "multiple undo" feature, which is - I think - the major reason many CygnusEd users are reluctant to switch over to what is really a more modern and professional-looking text editor. (Ooh, I know I am going to get flamed for this one...) You can "undelete" and "undo" a line, but these features are not terribly powerful. VENDOR SUPPORT Despite sending in my registration card, Oxxi has never contacted me about upgrades. There is no later version of TurboText than 1.03 (dated June 1991!), as far as I know. However, the author - Martin Taillefer - is on the net (he works for Commodore) and has promised an upgrade Real Soon Now. I hope it fixes most of the problems I described above and includes enhanced support for 2.0 and AGA machines. (I know it will use the ASL library for its file requestor, and I think it will also include a standard ScreenMode requestor.) The one time I e-mailed Martin, I got a prompt and helpful response. CONCLUSIONS This is a superb text editor. Despite the few problems I have with it, I still give it 9 out of 10. It is Style Guide-compliant, friendly, reasonably fast for most tasks, comes with a comprehensive manual, and has never caused my Amiga to crash. I just hope an update is released soon! COPYRIGHT This review is Copyright 1993 Barry McConnell. It may be distributed as long as no changes are made and it is left intact. If you want to contact me to ask further questions, my e-mail addresses are: Internet: bmccnnll@unix1.tcd.ie FidoNet: 2:263/150.2 Barry. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu