Subject: REVIEW: TurboText
From: [email-masked] (Barry McConnell)
Date: 11 Jun 1993 02:18:54 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	TurboText, version 1.03 (08 June 1991)

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	Text editor.

COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Oxxi, Inc.
	Address:	P.O. Box 90309
			Long Beach, CA  90809-0309
			USA

	Telephone:	(213) 427-1227
	FAX:		(213) 427-0971

PRICE

	I picked it up for 35 UK pounds at the Amiga Shopper show in London
last year, but I don't know what the current price is.  [MODERATOR'S NOTE:
US list price is $99.95, with mailorder prices around $60. - Dan]

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		Runs on all Amigas.
		512K RAM and 1 floppy drive required.

	SOFTWARE

		Requires at least Kickstart 1.2 and Workbench 1.3.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.  Installs on a hard drive.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	I tested the program on an A2000 with a GVP 120MB HD, in both 68000
mode (3MB RAM in total), and with a 68030 (11MB RAM in total).  I tried it
under AmigaDOS 2.04, 2.1, and also 3.0 on an A4000/040.

REVIEW

	About one year ago, I tried out a demo version of this product.  I
was so impressed by it, I knew I just had to buy it.  It complies fully with
the Commodore Style Guide, and it's very professional-looking.  It also
contains a huge number of features and is very stable.

	Initially, TurboText opens its own custom screen (or public screen
under AmigaDOS 2.0 and higher).  You can choose whether you want a low,
medium, or high-resolution display, and in 2 or 4 colours.  You can run
TurboText on the Workbench screen.  It uses simulated GadTools gadgets under
all AmigaDOS versions, which is OK for 1.3 users (who don't have GadTools),
but not for anyone who has upgraded.  For example, TurboText doesn't use
"real" cycle gadgets, so PD programs like CycleToMenu can't affect them.  It
uses the Topaz 8 font for all requestors (except the file requestor) and a
user-selectable (non-proportional) font in the text edit window.

	The file requestor is not the standard ASL one, although it is
similar and reasonably fast.  You can have as many windows open under
TurboText as you wish, and you can also split one window into two "views"
to edit two parts of the same file at once.

	Also included in the package is a programmer's calculator (with hex,
binary, and octal options, along with rotate and shift operations), but this
is severely crippled in that it is integer only.  It can be called from a
menu and run on the TurboText screen, or used as a stand-alone calculator
from the Workbench.

	You can open a window that shows the hexadecimal values of the
characters around the cursor (and of course edit your file this way), and
there is also the ability to open a console window (Shell) on TurboText's
screen.

	All the standard editing facilities you would expect are present,
including clipboard support, load/save/print clipboard, mark/paste vertical
blocks (neat!), find-and-replace (with limited pattern-matching), and
bookmarks.

	Extensive ARexx support is included, along with the ability to record
keystroke/menu macros on the fly and save them in files as ARexx macros.
The editor also supports "folds", whereby you can collapse the
currently-selected block of text (e.g., a procedure in a large C program) to
a single line so you can effectively see more of your file at once.  This is
similar to the collapse/expand feature found in outline processors.  You can
also convert blocks of text to upper or lower-case, as well as center and
justify lines of text (or whole paragraphs).

	There are three Preference windows.  "Display Prefs" allows you to
choose your screen mode, screen size, font and colours.  "Edit Prefs" handles
the way text is entered: word-wrapping, right margin, TAB width, overstrike,
etc.  And finally, "File Prefs" allows automatic creation of backup files
(name "template", how many, and auto-save delay) and other file-related
features.

	TurboText may also be customized using definition files.  These
allow you to specify what every keypress does.  For example, you might want
ALT-RightArrow to move the cursor to the end of the line, or CONTROL-Delete
to delete a single word.  You can also create or modify the menus using the
definition files.  Some vendors supply definition files to interface
TurboText with their applications.  For example, I know SAS/C V6 comes with a
new definition file to allow you to compile a program from within TurboText,
then cycle through all the errors at the touch of a key (interfaced through
ARexx to the SAS/C package itself).  Needless to say, this is an invaluable
tool.

	An additional (tiny) program is included with TurboText, called
TTX.  This program allows fast startup of the editor by checking to see if
TurboText is already resident in memory, and if so, passing it the name of
the file(s) you selected, saving the time that you would normally spend
waiting for the main program to load.  If TurboText is not already running,
TTX launches it.

	TTX also accepts the same ToolTypes as TurboText. This means you can,
for example, place it in your WBStartup drawer with "NOWINDOW" and
"BACKGROUND" ToolTypes.  Now, every time you reboot your Amiga, TurboText
will be silently loaded into memory (if TTX can't find it in the search
path, it checks the assignment "TurboText:"), and when you double-click on a
text file (with its Default Tool set to "TurboText:TTX"), it will load
pretty much instantly.

	TurboText also installs some hotkeys in the system.  Control-Alt-W
by default will open up a new window, ready for editing.  Even if your Amiga
is tied up doing something else (e.g., Workbench is copying files from
floppy, and you don't have a Shell handy), you can still instantly get a new
TurboText window, even if there are none currently open!  (This is what the
"BACKGROUND" ToolType is for - it doesn't unload the program when you close
the last window.)  Control-Alt-U will unload the program once the last window
has closed, and of course there are more hotkeys.  These hotkeys are
user-definable in the definition file.

DISLIKES

	In an effort - presumably - to combat fragmented memory situations,
when TurboText loads a file, it is read in in small chunks. (I think it
reads approximately 100 lines at a time.)  For small files, this is not a
problem; but if you are a sysop who regularly edits 1.5 MB nodelists, it is a
real pain.  A rival text editor, ASDG's CygnusEd, reads the entire file in
one go, which is basically instant if you have a fast hard drive; but of
course this won't work if you don't have one continuous block of memory free
for the file.  I would like the option to increase the size of TurboText's
loading buffer.

	Contrary to the operation of most word-processors, TurboText uses a
double-click to mark the start of a block of text, and a single-click to
select the end. This is fine if the block stretches across many pages (since
you can then use the scroll bar to move to the end), or if you need to use a
"Find" requestor to find the end; but it is a bit confusing initially when
you just want to select a single word or line.  I would like the option of
drag-selecting text.

	I recently used the ARexx macro facility of TurboText, and it needs
a bit of improvement. For example, I wanted to convert a line of text in the
following form:

	comp.sys.amiga.reviews 394

	...to:

	Assign comp.sys.amiga.reviews: UUNEWS:comp/sys/amiga/reviews DEFER

	Now, this is possible using a (complicated) ARexx macro, but it is
not exactly terribly fast. I think it took about two seconds per line on a
68000-based Amiga, and certainly processing a 2000-line file in this manner
took something like 15 minutes on a 25MHz A3000. (In case you're interested,
I copied the newsgroup name, pasted it (inserting "Assign", "UUNEWS:", and
"DEFER" where necessary), jumped back to the previous ":" using a Find
request, then searched forward for "." characters, replacing them with "/",
until I found myself on the next line.)

	A more serious problem is the handling of aborting ARexx scripts.
This is done by clicking on the close gadget of the window (which gives you
the standard "Close without saving changes?" requestor).  Now, I _have_
gotten this to work on occasion (e.g., with the sample "Towers of Hanoi"
script that comes with TurboText).  But for the application I described
above, for some reason clicking "OK" halted the script but left the window
on-screen, chewing up CPU time!  (As if it was executing an infinite loop.)
Now, the multithreaded nature of TurboText allowed me to work on other
files despite the "crashed" window, but it did slow down the whole machine.
I haven't investigated this too much, but it seems like a bug.

	Another problem I have is when I switch from TurboText to another
application:  say, the communications package Term.  After a while, Term
appears to have stopped accepting my keypresses (it can take some time to
detect that it is a local problem, since you initially think it's the remote
modem at fault).  In actual fact, the problem is TurboText has opened an
"Autosave?" requestor back on its own screen, made that the current window,
but failed to move its screen to the front. Since Term - when opened on a
public screen - does not have a window which will visibly deselect, this all
happens without alerting the user.

	The find-and-replace algorithms - while still blazingly fast - are
not quite as nippy as CygnusEd.  There is also no "multiple undo" feature,
which is - I think - the major reason many CygnusEd users are reluctant to
switch over to what is really a more modern and professional-looking text
editor.  (Ooh, I know I am going to get flamed for this one...)  You can
"undelete" and "undo" a line, but these features are not terribly powerful.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	Despite sending in my registration card, Oxxi has never contacted me
about upgrades.  There is no later version of TurboText than 1.03 (dated June
1991!), as far as I know.  However, the author - Martin Taillefer - is on the
net (he works for Commodore) and has promised an upgrade Real Soon Now.  I
hope it fixes most of the problems I described above and includes enhanced
support for 2.0 and AGA machines.  (I know it will use the ASL library for its
file requestor, and I think it will also include a standard ScreenMode
requestor.)  The one time I e-mailed Martin, I got a prompt and helpful
response.

CONCLUSIONS

	This is a superb text editor.  Despite the few problems I have with
it, I still give it 9 out of 10.  It is Style Guide-compliant, friendly,
reasonably fast for most tasks, comes with a comprehensive manual, and has
never caused my Amiga to crash.  I just hope an update is released soon!

COPYRIGHT

	This review is Copyright 1993 Barry McConnell.  It may be distributed
as long as no changes are made and it is left intact.

	If you want to contact me to ask further questions, my e-mail
addresses are:

	Internet: [email-masked]
	FidoNet:  2:263/150.2

Barry.

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