A GNU nano-like text editor for MSX 2.
Ricardo Jurczyk Pinheiro (ricardojpinheiro@gmail.com)
This editor resembles the GNU nano editor, using the same look-and-feel and most of the keystrokes. I decided to develop a text editor because I’m tired of using AKID/KID/TED/MPW/whatever in my MSXs, when I need to edit some code or even a batch file. So, think about it when you start complaining with me, asking why I didn’t implemented this or that amazing feature that you care about.
This editor is strongly based on Qed-Editor, a pretty old (1987!) text editor. By the way, there isn’t any licenses regarding the Qed-Editor’s source code, and I know it isn’t PD. But its author is unknown, it’s open source and I gave all the credits to her/him. So, don’t be a license zealot asking about code licenses which belongs to a software which had been abandoned. But Milli is GPL 3.0.
A MSX 2 with 128 Kb of VRAM and MSX-DOS 2 (if you use Nextor, it would be great). So it uses 80 columns, but it doesn’t use Memory Mapper. And sorry, no MSX 1 and/or MSX-DOS 1 versions in my horizon.
As I may have said, there are a lot of improvements that we can do, in order to use less VRAM memory, speed up the code… Sorry pals, I won’t do much more than that. But we can work with two or more files simultaneously… Maybe in the future.
This github page reunites some text editors that I’ve been working with. Milli is the first of them, but I hope I’ll build two other editors, in order to resemble the look and feel of the joe editor (my favourite Linux text editor) and DosEDIT, from MS-DOS (an all-time favourite). Of course, it’ll be done if I have some spare time.
Finally, the download link. Here it goes. If you want to get the source code, you can find a ZIP file here. I used Qed-Editor as the base editor, but I cannot forget some Kari Lammassaari (in memorian) libraries, like text window, blink and fastwrite routines (there is more, I guess), and PopolonY2K framework, from which I got some SCREEN 0 and MSX-DOS 2 routines. My greetings to their work.
Yes we can. There is a DSK file (download here, but you can runt it with WebMSX. Just click here. BTW, WebMSX is set to a Japanese MSX Turbo-R (is there any other Turbo-R which aren’t Japanese? 🤔) in order to have MSX-DOS 2 support.
We all love screenshots! Who doesn’t? Here it goes some of them:
The name may come from two places:
Remember that I created this text editor so I could fix my problems regarding text-editing in a MSX. And I hope it helps you too. I’m not a developer myself, I’m a maths professor who writes code for MSX for fun. There are a lot of improvements that I can imagine for milli, but maybe I won´t do it, because my lack of time and more projects to go. So, if you want to improve milli, be my guest, fork it and do your best. I’ll be glad to see that my work inspired you to work with my editors.
