On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 8:56 PM Gregory Pietsch <gpiet...@comcast.net> wrote: > > I'm thinking of editing Edlin to match historical behavior after > downloading a 1982 IBM DOS manual and a 1987 Microsoft OS/2 manual I > found floating around the 'Net. I want to make Edlin still the small > program it has always been without adding things that would make the > executable super-huge, so I want to get some feedback from the list > before I do anything. The things I am considering are below:
My thoughts: > 1. At the beginning of the program, when Edlin reads the file whose > name is on the command line, the historical thing to do is output > "End of input file" if the entire input file has been slurped in or > "New file" if the file does not exist yet. FreeDOS Edlin just runs the > same code as the T command to slurp the file in and give the output > of that command, which is the number of lines read. I think "New file" is good when you're starting a new file. But "End of input file" isn't very helpful information. I prefer "X lines read" if it's an existing file. That way, I will know if Edlin read my file correctly. > 2. The IBM DOS manual adds "#" as the line number that's one beyond > the last line. This should be an easy add that doesn't change existing > behavior. That's a nice feature that I'd forgotten about. Yes, that makes sense. > 3. The historical behavior for the Q command is to always verify that > the user wanted to quit the program with an "Abort edit (Y/N)?" message. I think it's always a good idea to verify that the user wants to quit. Yes, this sounds good to me. > 4. Historically, the E command erased any backup copy (i.e. the file > with the .BAK extension) after writing and before quitting. I don't > know if I want to emulate this behavior. I'll sometimes make a backup copy of a file before I edit it, so I might copy FDAUTO.BAT to FDAUTO.BAK before I edit the file, so I can go back to the backup copy later. It would be bad if Edlin deleted my backup copy on its own, just because it had the same "*.BAK" extension. I prefer Edlin not delete files. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
