I was surprised to see how old most of these programs are, and thus the problem is not so much the C64 but the fact the programmers had not yet learned much. So perhaps it can be forgiven that around 1983-1984, when the Plus/4 features were decided, there were no great examples around.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather an illustrative one. I've deliberately excluded one well known program, GeoWrite, because it is so tied to the GEOS setup. The desktop publishing software (!) Pagefox also includes an editor. There are also "conversions" of Vi and emacs I ignore for now.
I was mostly interested if the central "typing experience" was good quality or not. To use these programs at all in today's environment you'd need to be able to a) type quickly, b) insert effectively and c) scroll rapidly to view the document effectively. I gave these features a poor-ok-good-excellent ratings. I thought about reviewing the functions such as copy/paste, but they are sometimes a bit too difficult to find. And yes, I admit I did not use the real Commodore 64 to check these out.
Vizawrite
Looks more professional than most, with indentation and typewriter-style tabs and formatting characters. The cursor behaves pretty much as it ought to, but I could not find any proper insert mode to see if it delivers. At least there is the insert key and a means to "insert" typed text as a special command. The delete/move/replace/find functions are quite easy to find and operate.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Ok
Scrolling speed: Ok
Speedscript
Speedscript looks like one of those desirable minimalist editors that might really work very well, but the basic program functionality is a bit erratic for today's typist. It's fast enough, though.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Good
Scrolling speed: Good
Easy Script
Screen colors change from Control+1,2 and 3. Insert works pretty quickly, after setting the insert mode it works almost as you'd expect a modern text editor to work. It's slow at times, at least a bit when inserting carriage returns inside paragraphs.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Good
Scrolling speed: Good
Paperclip
Not bad at all, but hampered by slow inserting of whole lines. Otherwise the insert works pretty well. Control+keys bring out features almost from every key, so I guess it's comprehensive. There's find and copy range type functions. F2, F4 and F6 change screen colors, a welcome addition.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Ok
Scrolling speed: Good
Tekstinkasittely 80-400
An early Finnish effort with 80-column display. Don't be fooled though, the text has to be typed in line-numbered entities and even then it's pretty slow. I'd rather work my text in Basic REM statements.
Typing speed: Poor
Insert: Poor
Scrolling speed: Poor
TasWord
I think this originated from the ZX Spectrum, where a 64-column mode was very welcome compared to the standard 32. Here we have 80-column mode and it's surprisingly smooth. However text insertion does not work as one would nowadays expect, and inserting carriage returns inside paragraphs results in a long pause. There are different versions of this software, so perhaps some of them work better.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Ok
Scrolling speed: Ok
Paperback Writer
An overall good show, I'm just wondering about that large help/options bar at the top. I suppose there would be an option to reduce it. But hey, the "on-line" help is very comprehensive compared to many others on this list. Inserting works semi-ok.
Typing speed: Good
Insert: Ok/Good
Scrolling speed: Good
Kwik Write
From Fairlight, a standard text editor, but boy is it fast for both typing and inserting text in-between. The basic text typing, removing and cursor motion is what one would expect these days, with no hiccups. The program also keeps track of how many characters of memory are left. I could even consider using it for some real text editing.
Typing speed: Excellent
Insert: Excellent
Scrolling speed: Excellent
No comments:
Post a Comment