Hello guys,

I was wondering if anybody had experimented with block editors in the
range of 64 characters on 8 lines.

The standard forth screens are usually 64 characters on 16 lines but
by reducing from 16 to 8 lines, it becomes possible to optimize
certain features of the editor.

I was looking at line editors and created my own, but I didn't like
the overhead of "space" and "cr". They are interresting because they
allow you to operate in the Forth interpreter, but for quick and
productive work, "space" and "cr" seem to get in the way and account
for a large part of what we type on the keyboard when performing meta
manipulations on text. The idea is to operate transformations to lines/
blocks very rapidly without having to type any space or any carriage
return to execute commands.

By reducing the amount of text in blocks, we are able to fall on
single digits (1-8 lines) which opens the door to immediate execution
on every keystroke.

For example:

Jean-François Michaud comcast.net> wrote:

On May 17, 5:43 pm, Jean-François Michaud comcast.net> wrote:

But you've so far only solved half the problem--what about movement
*within* the line? Have you considered limiting lines to 8
characters, so you can reach any position with a pair of keystrokes?
This makes Forth blocks 64 bytes, which means you can store 8 of them
in what used to be a single, wasteful 512 byte block.

(tongue in cheek)
Andy Valencia

Update on the experiment :). It seems to be very efficient so far.
Code edit speed has increased many folds.

I included a few new functionalities to further the idea of ease of
work with the editor/buffers. So far I have:

n [1,8]

2 512 buffers. Each block of source is 64 characters on 8 lines of
text. Each buffer on screen is numbered 1 through 8 for single digit
convenience.

This is the screen output: