Re: For Kenny Frank re: BASIC?! re: (how many embedded

[kfrank@xxxxxxxx]

Robert-- as usual you have given me a lot to digest, and I don't
have time this minute to respond to everything, but one is easy.
 You said "I can't get all the Windowsy garbage out of sight
(the bars and buttons and stuff, and the bleeping COLOR) and
just have a tabula rasa or a black hole on the screen (like a
painter with a fresh canvas)". In fact you certainly can do
that-- I do all the time. THe buttons are easy-- simply turn
them off in your preferences and you never have to see them
again. Same for the format bar and ruler. Then if you want, by
pressing CTRL+SHIFT+V (for view) eliminate the menus as well and
have nothing but document.

When in this mode the command line is only visible when you press
F5.  Personally I think there should be an option to have the
command line always visible in this mode, which would in effect
completely duplicate in Windows the DOS interface, but for some
reason it hasn't been implemented that way... yet.

Also, while I only read your comments about
graphics/draft/expanded views cursorily, you should be aware
that expanded view is internally quite different, in that
essentially no processing is going on at all except to break
lines on the screen. As I understand it, I have probed in this
area a number of times, the different modes are, for better or
worse, really treated very differently internally. You are
right, of course, that since the display in Windows is all
graphic, to some extent each mode has some graphic attributes,
but I think that is where it ends.

More after I have had a chance to reflect and investigate.

K.

PS We have talked about resurrecting a small footprint II-like
editor, and these comments may push that discussion to the
forefront. I also agree about the editor as a multi-purpose
tool, and, for example, many of the lower level file management
tools are there. HTML is something we should do to be sure.
But as my "broken-record" has repeated many times, we simply
don't have the bandwidth to pursue everything at the same time,
and we have to figure where we will have the best shot of really
having meaningful success.