Build your MASM and FreeBasic projects with Notepad, WordPad, qEditor...

[jj2007]

Rumours say there are still fans of Notepad and similar editors. Here is a little project that makes Notepad build Assembly and FreeBasic projects (it works also with qEditor and WordPad).

Extract the exe and the sample sources
- for MASM to any folder on your Masm32 drive
- for FreeBasic to the folder where fbc.exe sits

Open one of the samples in Notepad or Wordpad and hit F6 (or F8 in the case of qEditor)

Note there is no need to save edits - whatever you add or change will be used immediately, but don't forget to save your source when you exit your editor.

[DebugBSD]

Rumours say there are still fans of Notepad and similar editors. Here is a little project that makes Notepad build Assembly and FreeBasic projects (it works also with qEditor and WordPad).

Extract the exe and the sample sources
- for MASM to any folder on your Masm32 drive
- for FreeBasic to the folder where fbc.exe sits

Open one of the samples in Notepad or Wordpad and hit F6 (or F8 in the case of qEditor)

Note there is no need to save edits - whatever you add or change will be used immediately, but don't forget to save your source when you exit your editor.

I think the best one is Vi. I've been using it since 1995 or so. Now there is Vim which is the improved version but I think that Vi is the best one. With all that shortcuts and the control mode I don't think that any editor can beat him. The only thing I miss from Vi/Vim is the color scheme from QEdit (wich is an editor from the MS-DOS era).

Nice weekend!

[Vortex]

I think the best one is Vi. I've been using it since 1995 or so. Now there is Vim which is the improved version but I think that Vi is the best one. With all that shortcuts and the control mode I don't think that any editor can beat him. The only thing I miss from Vi/Vim is the color scheme from QEdit (wich is an editor from the MS-DOS era).

While vi \ vim is a good editor, it's not the best one as it will depend on the personal choice of the coder. The GUI baased editors are providing a lot of benefits to the programmers.

[DebugBSD]

I think the best one is Vi. I've been using it since 1995 or so. Now there is Vim which is the improved version but I think that Vi is the best one. With all that shortcuts and the control mode I don't think that any editor can beat him. The only thing I miss from Vi/Vim is the color scheme from QEdit (wich is an editor from the MS-DOS era).

While vi \ vim is a good editor, it's not the best one as it will depend on the personal choice of the coder. The GUI baased editors are providing a lot of benefits to the programmers.

+1

I have to add that a good combination of vi+ctags+grep+cscope let you handle a huge project (with near 1000 files writen in assembly) without any problem. In 80's you hadn't an IDE because most of the software development was done in the terminal (MS-DOS or some kind of UNIX console) so you had to deal with huge projects without any IDE. Today, an IDE helps you a lot, but, it's not the ultimate tool to let you work with projects. In the middle of the 90's I had to write some device driver for the Linux Kernel (I'm talking about the first versions of GNU/Linux which appeared in 1996 under the distribution of Caldera UNIX Group (That was one of them, there were others like the old ESWare and Debian, LFS, and so on). That versions didn't provide a decent GUI version neither had an IDE.

[Vortex]

I remember the days of ZX Spectrum in the 80s where I didn't even have something like notepad or vi. You had to type all the READ\DATA statements in BASIC to do assembly programming. Using an assembler \ disassembler was difficult as you had to load it from a cassette recorder. Things evolved a lot after the 80s and 90s. Today, we have the opportunity to use various IDEs for programming.

[DebugBSD]

I remember the days of ZX Spectrum in the 80s where I didn't even have something like notepad or vi. You had to type all the READ\DATA statements in BASIC to do assembly programming. Using an assembler \ disassembler was difficult as you had to load it from a cassette recorder. Things evolved a lot after the 80s and 90s. Today, we have the opportunity to use various IDEs for programming.

hahaha

In my case in the 80's I had two personal computers. One Amstrad with a floppy disk (5 1/4) and a hard disk and I had an Olivetti which had a floppy disk (3 1/2). One of them had a MS-DOS. The other one had a GNU/Linux.

[jj2007]

I remember the days of ZX Spectrum in the 80s

Those were the days, my friend

Soon after the Spectrum, I bought an Atari ST, and used it for more than a decade. Even when I got a job in public administration, I kept working with it - and colleagues were quite impressed by the top quality of the black & white monitor, the speed, plus the fact that it was absolutely silent (I had a ramdisk but no harddisk, floppy was enough).

I wrote my own editor/word processor in a mix of GfaBasic and 68000 Assembly, including embedded graphics. Around 1990 I wrote and published (with a top editor) a scientific book, graphics included. But at a certain point they forced me to switch to Windows...

[Vortex]

 

Nice memories. I am probably one of the privileged individuals to write handcrafted machine code with READ \ DATA blocks. 

Today, we are luckier as we have more modern tools. I think nobody would wish to return to the past after today.

[hutch--]

I am blessed in that I completely dumped Z80 thinking and hardware and replaced it with Microsoft assembler, basic and C and a 486dx. I really did like the Microsoft PWB from MASM 6.0, it was slick, quick and with a few tricks (David Augustine's shellroom) could access external executables and do useful things then exit back to the PWB.

I did not start writing my own editors until Win3.0/1/11 but I never got the bug for using notepad style editors, I had used far more powerful editors for too long. Before I wrote the first version of QE, I used a very good editor called Programmers File Editor (PFE) which could open very large files and was very well written and I used it to write the first version of QE.

After the terrible editor in GFA basic, I swore I would never use another non pure ASCII editor and I have no feel for IDEs at all, I use the operating system to provide the environment I want with access at as many external items as I need, that's what the programmable menus are for.

[jj2007]

After the terrible editor in GFA basic, I swore I would never use another non pure ASCII editor

The Gfa editor had one real bug, it got occasionally confused with the position of the current column. I got used to it, as I had no choice

What I really liked:
- you couldn't leave a line that had a syntax error (except if you gave up and commented it out); therefore it was practically impossible to produce a compiler error!
- if you typed my$="Hello", it would ask you if you really wanted a new variable my$; a nuisance at the beginning (but you could switch the check off), a blessing once you had your n-thousand lines and hundreds of variables established, and didn't want to introduce new variables "by typo"
- the automatic syntax highlighting

With complex assembly sources, I've changed opinion regarding the last point: nowadays I prefer individual highlighting, i.e. a rich text format source (example).