This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,680 for Friday the 9th of September 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Edit.
It is part of the series, Dawes.
It is hosted by Aweka and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, more on Dawes.
This time it is Edit.
Hello, this is Aweka, welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing Dawes series.
Yes, there is still a little bit more to talk about here.
Well, I want to do this time is to talk about an applet that comes with Dawes called Edit.
Now, the Edit program that comes with Dawes looks like another external Dawes command.
But I call it an applet and I think there is a good reason for that.
An applet is the name given to a small limited application.
In this case, Edit is an ASCII text editor.
It is a handy application composed of two files, Edit.com, which is the application itself,
and Edit.hlp, which contains all of the help files.
Also Edit is a basic program.
So you need to have Qbasic.exe available as well if you want to run it.
Now, this is not a problem if you're running Edit from a hard drive where you have installed
Dawes.
But if you want to run it from a floppy disk, such as an emergency boot disk or an emergency
utilities disk, you need to remember to place Qbasic.exe on the same floppy as Edit.com.
Now, why would you want to do this?
Why would you want to use Edit?
It is a very basic text editor, if you're a Linux or a Unix hand, and you've been using
things like VIM and EMAX and what have you, you're not going to be impressed by Edit.
But remember, this was something that we were looking at in like 1981, maybe.
It was not something you'd use for writing a novel or for desktop publishing.
But it is a very handy little program because it'll fit on that floppy disk and enable
you to do some things.
Now, there are two major uses.
First is editing the configuration files.
The two files most commonly edited this way are config.sys and autoexic.bat.
So if you have Edit, you can edit both of those files.
And I think you can start to see why yes, this is a kind of thing you'd want to be able
to do with an emergency boot disk or an emergency utilities disk.
Now, the other common use for Edit in general is to create or edit batch files, which
you know, autoexic.bat is a batch file, but you can do other things.
Batch files are files that contain dusk commands, which are executed in order whenever
the batch file is run.
Now, we'll cover these topics in future installments, but first, useful to learn a little
about the tool we'll be using.
So how do we use the Edit Applet?
Well, from the command prompt, simply type the command edit.
Now, what that is going to do in the background is it's going to go to edit.com.
And then edit.com is going to say, oh, I'm a basic program.
So I need to have the basic environment up and running before I can do anything.
So then it will open Q-basic, run Q-basic.exe, edit will open inside of that, and then
you're ready to go.
Now, when you do this, you'll see a screen that says, welcome to the MSDOS editor.
Under this is an option that says, press Enter to see the survival guide.
Now, this brings up a one-screen summary of how to get around in edit.
Now, it turns out that this involves some keyboard commands that carry over the windows
as well, so learning this can pay dividends in the future.
Some day, you may actually need to know how to navigate windows without a mouse, and knowing
these keyboard equivalents will pay off.
I know it's hard to believe that you would navigate any kind of computer system these days
without a mouse, but in the days when we were doing this,
you didn't have a mouse unless you also loaded a mouse driver, which was not part of the
operating system.
You would buy a logic-tech mouse, and then there would be a disk that would have the driver,
you'd have to install the driver, and that driver would have to be loaded in your configs.
This file was a different world we were living in.
So knowing how to do that was a good idea, and to this day, every once in a while, something
will happen, and it's the fact that I know some keyboard commands pays off for me.
Now, on the top of your screen is the menu bar, and that says the following menus,
it should be familiar to anyone who has used windows, since the menus are very similar.
The first one is file, then edit, search, options, and last of all, help.
So we're kind of used to the same menus in much the same order these days.
If you press the Alt key, that activates the menu bar.
Pressing the Alt key while you're in edit, of course.
The first letter of each menu is now shown in white to indicate the hot letter you can
use to activate that menu.
So the file menu is already highlighted in a black box.
If you hit enter, that menu will open down.
If any menu choice is highlighted, you can hit enter to select that menu choice.
You can also use arrow buttons, the up and down arrows move up and down within a menu.
Right and left arrows move from one menu to the next.
Note that each menu also has many options that also have hot letters or some other keyboard
equivalent.
Now hot letters are the ones that work when you hold down the Alt key while pressing
that letter.
So the file menu is Alt F.
I think we're all used to that one.
So if you're working on a file and you want to check the help system, you just hold down
the Alt key and press H and then you will open.
And when those, it works just the same except there the hot letters are underlined.
Now if you look at the bottom of the screen, you'll see some other keyboard shortcuts.
The first one is also for the help system, which you can get to by pressing F1.
Now that's not two different keys, F and then one, it refers to the function keys at the
top of the keyboard.
Pressing F1 for help is another semi-standard in the Windows world.
Not all programs follow this practice, but most do.
So if you're ever at a loss in any program and press F1, see what happens.
At this point, you know at least three ways to get to the help system in two ways to get
to any menu option.
We'll little practice, you can get around quite easily in edit.
Now if you open the edit application as we did above, you will see that you're working
on an untitled document.
Now the moment you save the document, and if you want to do that, it will be Alt plus F to
open the file menu and an S for save.
You will see the title change to the name of your document.
The save dialog window allows you to create the name.
Now make sure it is no more than eight characters and no more than three letters for the
extension.
This is DOS.
It has the 8.3 limitation.
You can also choose which directory or drive you want to save it to.
Once you have everything right, you need to select OK, where if you change your mind, select
cancel, to navigate from one element to the next on the screen, you use the tab key.
By the way, I remember jumping from one thing to the next in Windows using the tab key.
Again, it's a little survival strategy when for some reason your mouse isn't working.
Now you can also include a file name as an argument in the Edit command.
If the file already exists, edit will open that file.
If it does not already exist, edit assumes you're creating a new file with this name
and opens a blank screen ready for you to start typing.
Now edit is a fairly primitive application, but it does have some good basic capabilities.
On the Edit menu, you can do cut, copy, and paste in your files.
And from the search menu, you can find a text string and you can change it to something
else when you find it, in our classic find and replace.
In the options menu, you will find you can change the default color scheme in case white
text on a blue background disagrees with you.
I tend to change mine and I still do this in terminal emulation programs and everything
else.
I like black text on a white background.
It's just to me, it is more readable than anything else, but it's personal preference.
Now can you use it with a mouse?
Yeah, you can, just assuming you have a mouse in your DOS environment, sure.
It is DOS, however, so before you do that, you better make sure you get the mouse driver
loaded.
And in most of the cases where you will want to use edit, you will not have a mouse driver
installed, and I have therefore focused on using a keyboard.
Now I'm thinking this is an emergency boot disk kind of thing, and if you're in an emergency
boot disk situation in DOS land, chances are you do not have a functioning mouse at that
point.
Now, in the long run, I think you'll be happier mastering keyboard navigation, and using the
Alt key, the arrow keys, and the tab key will become second nature.
And if you ever do find yourself trying to navigate in Windows with a mouse, you know,
these skills still come in handy, you know, because sometimes the mouse just isn't working.
Many times I've seen people completely stymied by a situation where a program window
has somehow moved to the point where all the control buttons are off the screen, so there's
nothing for the mouse to click on.
So, I said at the keyboard, hit a few keys, and everyone says, how did you do that?
Definitely cool.
So this is a hookah for hacker public radio, signing off, and it's always encouraging
you to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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