Re: can you rename editor.exe?

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from "J. R. Fox"  Fri, 09 Nov 2001
19:25:40 -0800

> I think there are some aspects of Xy that are hard-coded to
> look for Editor.Exe -- the Startup file, for one. I never
> messed with that.

Actually, it's the other way around: EDITOR.EXE is hard-coded to
look for STARTUP.INT -- unless the launch command instructs it to
look for a different startup file: EDITOR.EXE ,d:\path\mystart.new
(note the leading comma).

Renaming EDITOR.EXE was supposedly an iffy proposition in Xy3-;
whether this is true or not, I don't know. For what it's worth,
there is at least one hard-coded instance of the string "EDITOR" in
EDITOR.EXE v3.55, but none in v4.018. Moreover, Xy4+ is "self-
aware" to the extent that system VAriable  points to the
active program file, whatever its name. Thus, if you rename
EDITOR.EXE to XY4.EXE and locate it in D:\FOO,  returns
D:\FOO\XY4.EXE. All of this suggests that, in v4+ at least,
EDITOR.EXE can be freely renamed.

The need for a name-independent EXEcutable probably arose because,
when Signature and Xy4 were released, a Windows version heavily
based on the DOS source code was already contemplated, if not
already under active development. For obvious reasons, it was
desirable to name the Windows EXEcutable something other than
EDITOR.EXE (XW.EXE, as it turned out). A soft-coded, or variable,
EXEcutable name would make the DOS source more readily adaptable to
the Windows project. That's my theory, anyway.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/