22
votes
Accepted
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
There were many editors available for DOS, both standalone and included in development environments. I suspect that most developers using IDEs used their IDE’s built-in editor; those were perhaps the ...
- 118k
22
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
WordStar was one of the earliest and most popular word processing programs for CP/M and MS-DOS. One of the key features for a lot of people was the non-document mode. This did a few important things:
...
15
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
My favorite editor as a professional programmer in the DOS enthronement was E. The OP is mistaken in saying that E was not available until the 90s. True, it was not included with PC DOS until 1993, ...
- 8,663
13
votes
Accepted
Is there a common convention to describe the encoding of a legacy text file?
The closest thing to a universal convention (in the sense that it can be applied to any kind of text file, not necessarily universal adoption) that I know of is Emacs’ file-local variable declarations:...
- 21.6k
11
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I remember that in the late 1980s Multi-Edit for MS-DOS was quite popular.
- 18.3k
11
votes
Is there a common convention to describe the encoding of a legacy text file?
When 8-bit codepages were in use, files were rarely transferred from one computer to another that used a different character set. So all files on the filesystem were assumed to contain text in the ...
- 840
10
votes
What page layout parameters imitate a line printer?
I would assume it to be already covered in this answer.
Basic Numbers for classic printers are
Width of 14 inch
Height of 8½ inch
10 characters per inch
8 lines per inch
At 132 columns the usable ...
- 213k
8
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
If you came from CP/M then you were familiar with Wordstar.
Turbo Pascal used the same keys as Wordstar, so it was also a popular editor (as you can already see from the comments) for everything that ...
- 26k
7
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Lexicon
Lexicon was a text editor / word processor MS-DOS program that was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and Russia at the end of 1980s and in 1990s. Some estimate that Lexicon was illegally ...
- 79
6
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
WordPerfect was the leading word processor from roughly 1986 to 1993, with 60% market share at its peak. (The previous leading word processor was WordStar.) It was available for many other operating ...
- 8,549
6
votes
Was ∆ used in APL as a substitute for space because ECMA-17/ISO 2047 specified △ as graphical representation for space?
Some observations, not an entire answer.
In APL\360, only upper case letters, underlined upper case letters, and digits were allowed in user-defined names.
(There were a couple of exceptions: ...
- 33.5k
6
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
My favorite text editor, until Windows 7 rendered it unusable, was PC-Write 3.01, a shareware program for which I purchased the manual.
I don't know how many other people used it, but it ran quickly ...
- 34.7k
5
votes
Accepted
What page layout parameters imitate a line printer?
You'd be surprised, but this is much harder than it looks. Even forgetting about cosmetic niceties like green bars, aspect ratio and appropriate fonts, putting exactly M×N characters in a block on a ...
- 20.5k
5
votes
What page layout parameters imitate a line printer?
In my experience, the common size for line printer paper was 14" or so (i.e., actually a bit more to include the feed holes) x 11", with standard horizontal spacing 10 characters per inch (...
5
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I have always preferred the Norton Editor. Over the years I have investigated many other text editors and I have always returned to the Norton Editor.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ...
- 1,043
4
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Many have already mentioned WordStar but no one has mentioned Galaxy, which I used extensively in the late 80s (87-89). I found it better than WordStar, as (to me) it seemed easier to use and more ...
- 3,349
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Personally, I used Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Using the same keystrokes saved a lot of time when context switching. Turbo Pascal was one of my first serious programming languages. I Wrote a custom ...
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
The text editor within Borland Sidekick was great. At the end of the 80s, I was developing a Lisp-based add-in for AutoCAD (around 500 kloc of Lisp) and having a TSR editor at my fingertips was a ...
- 611
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
As a young teen I was using XTree and later XTree Gold on my 286 from 1989 onward.
It was a file commander but had an Editor as well, which was very handy. I spend many hours "shortening" ...
- 400
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I used to use edit.com that came with MS-DOS 6.22 and looked a lot like Q-Basic. I also used WordStar for MS-DOS a little bit but mainly edit.com because it was easily accessible.
3
votes
Is there a common convention to describe the encoding of a legacy text file?
Browsers and other programs that attempted to automatically deduce the character encoding of text files would scan them for patterns, such as opening and closing quotation marks, or common words in ...
- 8,549
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I started on PC-DOS in 1985.
The word processor first used was MultiMate and then Word - the DOS version. I was a programmer so not really writing letters etc. Then I used Windows 1 Write
Most of my ...
- 181
2
votes
What page layout parameters imitate a line printer?
Typically, people were happy enough to get ink on paper without thinking too much about dimensions.
For a common desktop dot matrix printer, a usual size on US "Letter" size paper (8.5" ...
- 6,849
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible