Eidersoft
£29.95
Anyone who has programmed his or her ST at all will
have used some sort of text editor to enter the program into the
computer. Manufacturers of computer languages usually (but not
always!) provide some sort of editor with the language package. Why
then would any software house expect a programmer to pay £30 on top
of the expensive language software when the editor is something you
get for free?
Unfortunately, the quality of bundled text editors is
not all that high. Software manufacturers are understandably
reluctant to expend time and effort on a product which is merely to
be given away. Tempus, from the German software house Creative
Computer Design is an attempt to combine the best of both worlds,
but you will have to dig deep into your pocket for it. Is is worth
it?
Tempus comes on one single sided disk plus a
comprehensive loose leaf manual in a grey ring binder. The manual is
well printed and very thorough and clear in its explanations, screen
shots are used where appropriate. The disk is not copy protected,
the manufacturers having correctly surmised that no-one would buy a
text editor that could not be copied onto other disks. You do have
to go through an installation procedure the very first time you use
Tempus, but it is quick and easy and it only has to be done the once
(in fact you can only do it once as the installation program is
deleted after it is run!).
The editor itself is fully GEM-based but has been
enormously enhanced in that many of the GEM routines have been
rewritten in 68000 assembly language which considerably increases
the speed of operation (GEM itself is written in C). On loading the
program you are presented with a file selector, not the standard GEM
file selector we know and love(!), but a completely revamped
selector with many additional features. For example, it contains
selectable buttons for all currently available drives, if you want
to look at the directory on another drive, just click on the button.
There are also a series of buttons to select all the common filename
extenders (.C, .DOC. .TXT, .S etc) so you don't have to keep
re-typing the directory line of the selector. This is how the GEM
file selector should have been written! Two problems with the
standard selector have been put right, typing an underscore into the
directory line no longer crashes the machine, and the 'action'
button (which contains 'OK' on the standard selector) now contains
the name of the operation to be performed (Load, Save etc.). You can
also pass an argument line containing the name of a file to be
loaded when Tempus is run, if you run it from a shell program. The
authors say that Tempus is compatible with currently available shell
programs although there was apparently a problem with early versions
of Metacomco's Menu+ (later versions are OK). I have been using
Tempus with Menu + for some weeks now without difficulty.
'one of the finest pieces of professional software'
File loading and saving has been speeded up – simple tests showed
that it took 7 seconds for Tempus to load a 35K file, 18 seconds for
Metacomco's ED and 22 seconds for 1st Word. Up to four files may be
present in memory simultaneously and the loaded file is displayed in
an enhanced GEM window. The title line of the window, in addition to
the file name, contains the current line and column numbers that the
cursor is in and these are updated when you move the cursor. This
makes it very easy to go to any specified line, but more of this
later. A major improvement is found in the window arrows and scroll
bars. These auto-repeat so that all you do is click on an arrow or
scroll bar and hold the button down to scroll through a complete
document. Scrolling is incredibly fast – a complete screen of text
scrolls smoothly past in under a second.
Tempus contains a full set of facilities for moving
around the text more precisely. You can jump to any specified line
number, move to top or bottom of the text, or to the beginning or
end of a line – all with equal speed and ease. You can also set
invisible markers in the text and so move instantly to and fro
between different areas of the text – a feature I found to be
extremely useful. All the usual block and search/replace facilities
are there, and are carried out so quickly as to be virtually
instantaneous. The editor can even build a cross-reference list for
any specified string. Once the list is built, clicking with the
right mouse button on an entry in the list moves the cursor
instantly to that line in the main text.
Tempus has many other features, too numerous to
discuss in detail here, but I will just mention briefly that it can
of course print your text files, that there is an inbuilt
programmer's calculator, that a digital clock is displayed at the
top of the screen and that it can use alternative fonts designed
with DEGAS. The facilities of Tempus are accessed either through
drop-down menus or via the function keys, and all facilities are
also available from the keyboard using Control-key or Alternate-key
combinations. If you use certain text strings frequently these can
be assigned to one of the function keys used in conjunction with
Shift or Alternate. These and many other customisable features of
Tempus can be saved to disk as part of an installation file loaded
whenever Tempus is run.
I can only think of one missing feature – there is no
facility to automatically change the case of a letter or word on
which the cursor is resting, you have to delete and retype it. It
would also have been nice to have one or two disk utility features
present, such as disk format and file deletion and rename, but this
is just nitpicking. There is one small but irritating bug –you
cannot get the apostrophe (') from the keyboard! The reason is that
the inbuilt clock can be toggled on or off with the Alt-'
combination, but the '-key without pressing Alternate has the same
effect! All is not lost though because Tempus can display a
character table similar to 1st Word, and you can get the apostrophe
from that. I can live with this in order to use this amazing
program.
Having run out of superlatives, all I can say in
conclusion is that if you are at all interested in programming the
ST you will find Tempus very useful indeed. Go out and buy what must
be one of the finest pieces of professional software available
today. It is worth every penny.
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