Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

What are words worth?
THE special on word processors in the August and September
issues of Amiga Computing may have overlooked an option
now more widely considered — the public domain solution.
I Edit, Uedit
B definition, a text editor becomes
a Y word processor when it has a print
facility. t By the revised Russell-Walker
definition,
h
the text editor must be able
to
e
print and wordwrap to earn the
coveted Magimix des Mots d'Or.
W
Uedit easily qualifies for that title.
Although a designed as an efficient text
editor, l it has slowly evolved to
become k quite a powerful word
processor. e It is also a wonderful
example r of Shareware in action.
s
Uedit has undergone at least five
revisions, all of them at the behest of
its t users. It costs between $48 and
S103 a to buy the newest Uedit, the
lower n price representing the fullyconfigurable
d Uedit with on-disk
documentation.
a
r The upper price, which is still
under d E60, will buy you a spellchecking,
low level programmable,
Wordstar VI, and Gold Key emulating
Uedit. complete with neatly bound
printed user manual. The spelling
checker dictionary will be American,
but that's no crime considering that
current thought has it that American
English spelling is more correct than
English English.
The shareware Uedit has most of the
features you could ever ask for in a
text engitThave for spelling check. It
has particularly good formatting
facilities, allowing multi-column text,
and fully adjustable margins, headers
and footers.
Speedwise, Uedit is up there with
the best. Scrolling is particularly
speedy — the longer you hold the
cursor key, the faster it gets, right up
to a full-speed hardware vertical
scroll. Lovely stuff.
But there are some slightly odd
things about Uedit which may not
endear you to it. First, it assumes you
have a US keyboard, which mean your
hashes come out quoted if you don't
have that keyboard. Most UK people
;
Ram Disk I do
**** DISCLAIMER ****
can accept no responsibility, if you crash your Amiga or lose text fi les
th Uedit. No guarantees, either explicit or implied, are made as to
it's safety. If you use it, it is at your own risk.
**se ***.****** *es*
ar folks,
o Getting Started, below, for immediate instructions.)
dit is an editor for technical users. I t has many wordprocessing features.
deve
o Be
o Be
o Be
o Be
o Be
Half
-
edit don't have that keyboard.
or, Secondly, Uedit uses the secondary
hcursor a keys, that being the numeric
lkeypad. f Dunno about you, but I use
-the
keypad a lot, so I'm not too keen
Where, oThe
"real" cursor keys are used
rto kshunt
the displayed area around,
bbut enot
the cursor.
nA cneat
trick of Uedit's that even still
h I'm , not sure how it manages, is that it
Ucan
double as a second Workbench
e
screen. You can open windows on it
d
and run programs, but the other
iWorkbench
is still available. Never
t
found it to be much use myself, but
s
someone Might.
t
a
l
k
s
t
h
e
I there's only one program which
s
t
bills N itself as a wordprocessor. It's
called
ra
Wordwright, and has some
e
utterly l unique features.
el
Wordwright is a old program by
t
Amiga standards (1986) but even then,
some t features have never been
s
bettered. h Its most useful feature is a
built e in text-outliner which works in a
rather t clever way,
1 Outlining h a piece of work before you
start o writing it is one of these
disciplines
u
(like touch-typing) that
s
a
• PUBLIC DOMAIN •
it-Tutor Stiles
((See Uedit-Policy for purchasing info.))
loping and enhancing Uedit, the aims have been for the user to:
able to work without bumping into limits of power and capacity;
able to automate repetitive work, eliminate tedium, save time;
rid of the irritation of wasted keystrokes and stodgy performance;
able to customize the environment fu119;
able to create, on the spot, new capabilities that are needed.
it is Shareware. You can get a copy from a friend or off a computer
tvork and try it ouillimerder to decide whether to purchase the real thing
The latest full shareware
distribution of Uedit was on Fred Fish
Disk 286. with an updated main
program of Fish 301. You'll need Disk
286 even if you have a look at the
update, but 286 alone should be
enough to see whether you like Uedit
and are willing to pay for it.
The really neat thing about
registering Uedit is that you get a
personalised version of the Shareware
program. If you spread this version
and others register after seeing your
Shareware Uedit, you earn $15
commission. Definitely Share and
Enjoy.
Wordwright for right words
everyone says is A Good Thing but
few people ever get round to doing.
Wordwright makes it so easy that it's
almost more bother not to outline.
All you need do is type in your
headings, and then highlight them.
After that, you "expand" each heading
in turn, write your spiel, and then
"collapse" the section. This hides the
section text, leaving only the heading
showing.
That means that a 20 page document
could occupy just 20 lines, each
AMIGA COMPUTING November MO 95