Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: keithc@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu (Keith Christopher) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Textra version 1.14 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 11 Aug 1993 18:05:11 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 208 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <24bccn$de2@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: keithc@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu (Keith Christopher) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: text editor, shareware PRODUCT NAME Textra version 1.14 BRIEF DESCRIPTION GUI-based Amiga text editor. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Mike Haas Address: 3867 La Colina Rd. El Sobrante, CA 94803 USA E-mail: mikeh@starnine.com Also author of JForth Professional and LCD Calculator. LIST PRICE The program is shareware: $25.00 (US). SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE At least 40K of free RAM. Fully hard drive installable via a install script. Worked on all CPUs. Tested on: A4000, A2500, A500 SOFTWARE None. COPY PROTECTION None. Hard drive installable. MACHINES USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000, 6MB Fast RAM, 2MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 3.0. Amiga 2500, 8MB Fast RAM, 1MB Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 2.04. Amiga 500, 1MB Fast RAM, 512K Chip RAM, AmigaDOS 2.1. The A4000 is stock, the 2500 is a 68020 CBM, and the A500 has a 512K memory expansion board. REVIEW I originally did my text editing with Textra 1.12. I used it on my A2000 under 2.04 without a hitch. After selling my 2000, I waited to buy a 4000. After I purchased my 4000 I again wanted Textra. After ftp-ing and installing the 1.14 version, the first thing I noticed (and appreciated) was it was NOT crippled in any way. This is excellent because, like most of you, I hate getting a piece of shareware and finding that the one feature I wanted to test is disabled!! This makes you want to uninstall the author's programming language. But not Textra! Instead, the unregistered version has one of the most troublesome startup screens one could want to wade through to get things going. Worth the wait? After testing it out, yes! Worth the wait every time I want to edit my code. NO WAY. Calling the program from Workbench is easy enough: double click the icon. (Can't understand why it says "Textra 3.0" though.) The first thing you are greeted by is a personalized registration screen (which goes away quickly) followed by a window that identifies the disks available on your system which are placed beside a listview window to select the document to edit. After selecting a drive and a file to edit, you get a 1/2 screen window that has the look and feel of a pretty hard hitter. I was really surprised by the interface and options available. In the upper left corner it displays the column and line number. In the title bar of the window it displays the path with the filename being edited. The menus supply the basic find/cut/paste/open/save/save as options as well as some other nice features. The Windows menu lists all open files; so if you are editing several hunks of code, you can easily find the one you are looking for quickly and painlessly. The Edit menu provides the common cut/paste/find commands and houses find&replace, go to selected line number, case setting, and the edit preferences. Editing preferences gives you options like auto-indent, auto-backspace, tab length... you get the picture. Utilities menu is one sweet pick. The options are: set file protections(RWED), keyboard "keystroke command" help (e.g. Amiga X = Cut), The ARexx interface (perfect for use with your favorite compiler!), and the font preferences. The list of things you can do with this editor is huge. The documentation is well written well and one can search quickly and painlessly through it by highlighting the topic number and hitting right-amiga-F (if you are in Textra 8-)). If you want a very good text editor and manipulator with an excellent ARexx interface (50 commands), this is the one for you. I have personally used this editor for writing code and searching/editing documentation and feel it is well worth the registration fee. It worked flawlessly under 3.0 on my Amiga 4000, as Textra 1.12 worked as well on my 2000 under 2.04. It is Enforcer clean as Mike states in his documentation (I didn't get any hits). I did get a "guru" (I know he's dead in 3.0 but I miss him) error twice when loading a file but I could not replicate the errors. Textra multitasks extremely well with everything I've tried to run (i.e., SAS/C 6.3, Virus Z, TrashMan, Toolmanager 2.1, DirOpus, Xcomm, Term3.4, PowerSnap... you get the idea (these were all running at once). DOCUMENTATION Documentation is disk based. LIKES AND DISLIKES Loved that the registered package comes with very detailed documentation, and 30 ARexx scripts. The Installer allowed one to install the documentation in a separate directory. (I have all my documentation in one directory, so this was nice.) Textra can be intergrated with JForth Pro 3.x, HSPascal, Paul Kienitz's Q-Blue Offline Mail Reader, and I've used it in conjunction with SAS/C 6.3! Mike also includes his LCD calculator with the registered version. From the WhatsNew.doc file: "Programmers will find this nice: "If you double click on any of these characters... ( ) < > [ ] { } Textra will search through the file in the appropriate direction for a "balanced match" (handles nested substrings). This is great, for example, when programming C and you want to see everything that the { you're staring at encompasses. Textra will highlight everything forward to the balancing } character." I would love to see a preferences editor that would allow one to input compilation parameters and hit F1 to compile. A dictionary module would be nice, but it's a text editor not a word processor. The most needed option I can see is an Iconify. I am spoiled by the terminal emulation programs out there that do this: Terminus 2.0, Xcomm 1.0, Term3.X, and so on. This is a sweet option. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Other than a couple of very poorly written editors for the Amiga, I can only compare it to the system supplied editors. Ed is like UNIX "vi" to me. If I need a quick and painless edit this is the way to go, I would not call Textra up each time I needed to edit a single line, it was not made for this. Compared to Memacs, simply put, Use Textra ! 8-) Textra is much easier to move around in than Memacs. With the ARexx ability it is much more practical to use. If you are not familiar with Memacs, I strongly recommend you get Textra, or kludge around Memacs for a while. (While I am not knocking Memacs, I just find it hard to learn the ins and outs for new users.) BUGS I only had 2 system alerts while using Textra; however I could not replicate them no matter how often I tried. VENDOR SUPPORT I e-mailed Mike @ starnine with a question and he quickly answered it and that was that. He offers $5 (US) upgrades once you register Textra. WARRANTY No warranty is expressed or implied. (Straight from the documentation.) CONCLUSIONS If you want a very good text editor and manipulator with an excellent ARexx interface (50 commands) this is the one for you. I have personally used this editor for writing code and searching/editing documentation and feel it is well worth the registration fee. Rating: 4 stars out of 5 COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review is freely distributable. Keith Christopher Welch Medical Library Unix System Administrator --- 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 Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews