OpenEuphoria

Re: Pete Lomax M Editor vs Edita

• Posted by Pete Lomax <petelomax at blueyonder.co.uk> Jun 04, 2006
• 552 views

On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:42:28 -0700, Serge Lavigne
<guest at RapidEuphoria.com> wrote:

>posted by: Serge Lavigne <lavigne.s at videotron.ca>
>
>Greg Haberek wrote:
>> 
>> > What are the main differences between these 2 editors?
>> 
>> Edita is being actively developed. MEditor is not.
Correct

>I Know that. I used M Edidor in the past. What I I'd like to know is why Pete
>stopped developping
>M Editor and started a new editor from scratch. Is Edita More modern, more
>capable, more advance etc? in What ways?
I inherited MEditor, which uses win32lib. There were many things I
really didn't fully understand (esp scrollbars and pixmaps) and in the
end I found myself fighting with the complex innards of win32lib.
Whilst MEditor was quite popular, several people complained about the
performance, and using a low-end machine myself, I had to agree.

So I looked at a few alternatives and found Arwen. At first, it was
just supposed to be a quick experiment, but three weeks later I had a
basically working editor that was blindingly fast. I was smitten.
Internally, it was *so* much simpler [than win32lib], so much so that
I ended up adding support for listviews and treeviews myself, without
/that/ much trouble.

Maybe it is simply that one of win32lib's intentions is to hide the 
windows API, and maybe it does so a bit better than it ought, but it 
took a move to Arwen to open my eyes with regards to understanding 
how the windows api actually works. This is not supposed to be a bash 
against win32lib, but arwen is, at least to me, clearly a better tool 
to write something like an editor with. I will concede that my path to
learning/understanding the windows api may cloud my judgement.
IIRC somewhere it may also state that one of win32lib's intentions is
to make development simpler, even if that is at the cost of the final
program's performance. In contrast, Arwen says "speed rules!"

There are also a handful of "unfixable" bugs in MEditor. I've been
pretty anal about copying code from MEditor to Edita without at least
either thoroughly reviewing it or much more often rewriting it from
scratch. All in all, Edita is better: upgrade today!

Regards,
Pete