OpenEuphoria

ed on XP

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Dec 18, 2003
• 414 views

Lately I've been doing a lot of editing,
converting thousands of lines of C to Euphoria.
This is all part of the project to convert the
Euphoria "front-end" and translator to Euphoria.

I'm noticing that when running ed on XP
there's a tiny, almost imperceptible, delay from the
time I hit a key to the time it's echoed on the screen.
This didn't used to happen on earlier versions of Windows,
not even on my old 486 running Windows 3.1, so it's
not that Euphoria itself is slow.
I'm now running a Pentium-4 and the delay sometimes
throws my timing off a bit so I, say, delete an extra
character that I didn't intend to, etc.

I think Microsoft on XP has chosen to emulate DOS
screen I/O in a very slow way. I know on NT they used to
introduce an extra process to handle the simulated
DOS screen, so the characters that you typed were
transmitted from one process to another.

Anyway, I've found a really easy solution.
Do the following:
     1. run:
            makecon.exw
        in euphoria\bin
        You can double-click it. This will create exwc.exe,
        a console-oriented version of exw.exe.

     2. edit euphoria\bin\ed.bat, replacing "ex.exe" with "exwc.exe"

Now when you run ed, it will use the Windows console version of
Euphoria instead of the DOS version to interpret ed.ex.
ed seems to run fine. I'm using a 43-line console window in XP
to match the default setting in ed.ex. The slight typing delay
is gone, and ed starts up instantly.

On older versions of Windows, I think you should stick with ex.exe.

Note: you could simply use exw.exe. It's just that you'll
have an extra console window on your desktop while you edit.

Regards,
    Rob Craig
    Rapid Deployment Software
    http://www.RapidEuphoria.com