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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welcome to the first CygnusEd update in more than seven years! This document describes what you can find on this CD and lists the changes since CygnusEd Professional V4.0 was published: 1. Installation 2. Known issues 3. Documentation 4. ARexx scripts 5. Localization 6. Archival material 7. Credits 8. Changes in CygnusEd 9. Future development This version of CygnusEd is being published by: APC&TCP Postfach 83 83234 Übersee Germany http://www.apc-tcp.de info()apc-tcp.de Visit the web site, and check out the forums. This is where you'll get product support and find any updates that may be released in the future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 1. Installation ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Double-click on the "Install_CygnusEd" icon. This will copy the editor, the utilities, the online documentation and the ARexx script files to your hard disk drive. If your Amiga is equipped with an MC68020 CPU (or a more modern processor like the MC68060) a special version of the editor can be installed which will run faster on your machine than the generic version. For PowerPC Amigas running AmigaOS version 4 or better a complete set of programs specially built for this platform can be installed instead. This is in fact the recommended installation for the PowerPC platform. Before the installation takes place, your system partition will be examined in order to locate any older CygnusEd installation, which will be deleted. Only the editor itself and the utilities will be removed, any older CygnusEd ARexx scripts will remain untouched. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 2. Known issues ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is a list of small issues you may encounter during or after installation, or which you might be curious about. We tried to fix all the known issues (another word for "bug") in CygnusEd and its utilities, but there's only so much you can do. Needless to say, the problems we find and which can be addressed, will filter down as software updates, to be downloaded from the web site. 1. The "about" requester window still mentions "Schatztruhe GmbH" This is because of the old localization text, which contains the distributor's name. The new CygnusEd localization files will update this information, but the old ones will stay around until you reboot your Amiga. We recommend that you reboot your Amiga anyway after CygnusEd has been installed. 2. User interface titles, labels and text are truncated or garbled You may have to update the localization files CygnusEd uses. CygnusEd already comes with an updated german localization which fixes any possible issues with truncated titles and labels, but localizations for other languages may have to be adapted. The reason why interface titles, labels and text may be truncated or garbled lies in a change made for CygnusEd which made formatted text output more robust. This was done by changing the text formatting code to use the operating system functions rather than what the 'C' compiler's library offered. Where a text such as "Line %d" previously managed to produce a label "Line 42", this no longer works. In this example the "Line %d" has to be replaced by "Line %ld" to work again. If you are a programmer: it's the change from sprintf() to exec.library/RawDoFmt(). 3. The MorphOS port CygnusEd V4 was developed more or less in parallel for the 68k AmigaOS platform and MorphOS. Unfortunately, the development diverged at some point, and we have been unable to merge the different branches. Due to lack of hardware, software and experience we have not been able to produce a MorphOS port of CygnusEd V5 yet, but you can rest assured that it is in the works. Availability will be announced on the web site, and if you have paid for the 68k version you will be able to upgrade to the MorphOS version at no charge. 4. Mouse wheel CygnusEd V5 supports the mouse wheel for scrolling in projects. There are two standards for mouse wheel support: NewMouse and the native AmigaOS4 method. NewMouse is implemented in the UAE emulator, for example, and some PS/2 mouse drivers for the 68k Amiga support it as well. MorphOS may support this standard, too, but we do not know for sure. The AmigaOS4 port of CygnusEd V5 supports only the native mouse wheel support method. Please note that mouse wheel support was added rather late in development of AmigaOS4 and you may have to have AmigaOS4 update #4 installed in order to use it. 5. Key mapping This CygnusEd version is the first which attempts to allow you to map macros to any key on the 105 international key keyboard, and it is also the first which maps certain functions of this keyboard to built-in editor operations, such as "Page down" or "Home". The keyboard layout assumed by CygnusEd follows the standard used by Commodore. If your keyboard does not exactly agree with it and sends key codes that do match this standard, you're in for a surprise. It is possible that MorphOS may use a different keyboard layout for the "extra" function keys ("Page down", etc.). We were unable to tell for certain if there is any difference between the layouts. If there is, please let us know what to expect and we'll try to find a fix. 6. Syntax colouring, folding, and all that jazz Yes, these are really sexy features every editor should have. Except, well, CygnusEd may probably have to wait a little longer before they can be made to work. Sorry, but CygnusEd is first and foremost a text editing engine designed for fast text output and text manipulation. You'd be shocked to know how differently it works from just about every other text editor on the planet. While this "different" design has its perks, there are drawbacks, too. One of them is that syntax colouring and folding are hard to implement. We'll try hard to fit new features into the CygnusEd design as the editor evolves, but it's far from an easy task, so please bear with us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 3. Documentation ----------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CygnusEd comes with documentation on disk (or rather, on CD). This file is called "CygnusEd_Manual.guide" and can be browsed with the Workbench "MultiView" utility. You can also read the documentation from within CygnusEd: just hit the [Help] key on your keyboard. The documentation was originally written by Bruce Dawson and has been updated and enhanced for this CD release. It now includes a complete description of the CygnusEd ARexx interface. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 4. ARexx scripts ----------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We have provided a collection of ARexx scripts for use with CygnusEd. Their features vary widely from programming utilities to controlling AmigaTeX. You can find the packages in the "Extras/Script_Packages" drawer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 5. Localization ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The user interface text of the editor and the utilities is available in English and German. For your convenience (so you may change the translation text or create your own translations) we have provided all the data that was used to create language catalog files. You can find them in the drawer "Extras/Localization". Please note that due to changes in the organization of the user interface text, the new V5 and the old V3.5 catalog files are no longer compatible, i.e. any older program version cannot safely use the new text and the other way round. Therefore, we recommend that you reboot your machine after installing CygnusEd with the new catalog files. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 6. Archival material ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Much has changed in the Amiga world since the last CygnusEd update. The same is not true for the contents of this CD-ROM. All the contents of the original 1997 CygnusEd Professional 4 release can be found in the "Extras" directory, with new additions such as the "Ed" source code and updated localization files. This means, for example, that if you sent in your "CygnusEd Professional 4" CD-ROM in order to receive an update at a discount, you will find all the old data on the CD. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 7. Credits ----------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This update would not have been possibly without Bruce Dawson's help and generousity. It is rare for an Amiga software author to hand over the source code of his premier product to a different programmer, allowing him to continue to work on it. The following people helped testing the CygnusEd Professional 4 and 5 updates and contributed work and ideas to the project (in alphabetical order): Tobias Abt Andrija Antonijevic Niels Bache Adolf Brunner Neil Cafferkey Stefan Falke Wolf Faust Philippe Ferrucci Alexander Kneer Niels Knoop Frank Mariak Thomas Rapp Matthias Scheler Angela Schmidt Ralph Schmidt ...and many forum posters known only by interesting pseudonyms Thanks must also go to everyone who reported bugs in the old CygnusEd release or submitted enhancement requests. Without all their help, CygnusEd would look very differently today or there would not have been an update in the first place. Thank you very much to all of you! The spanish language localization was contributed by Javier de las Rivas. Thank you very much! The regular expression search and replace functionality is based upon code developed by Henry Spencer: Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 Henry Spencer. All rights reserved. This software is not subject to any license of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company or of the Regents of the University of California. Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose on any computer system, and to alter it and redistribute it, subject to the following restrictions: 1. The author is not responsible for the consequences of use of this software, no matter how awful, even if they arise from flaws in it. 2. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented, either by explicit claim or by omission. Since few users ever read sources, credits must appear in the documentation. 3. Altered versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software. Since few users ever read sources, credits must appear in the documentation. 4. This notice may not be removed or altered. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 8. Changes in CygnusEd ----------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CygnusEd Professional 5 is primarily a maintenance update which fixes bugs in the older V3 and V4 releases and adds a set of new features. The program structure and the fact that so many users have got accustomed to how CygnusEd looked and worked in the previous ten years made it difficult to introduce radical changes. 1. Requirements CygnusEd and the utilities now require Kickstart 2.04, older operating systems are no longer supported. The editor still runs fast on Amigas equipped only with an MC68000 CPU and 512K of memory. The software is no longer copy protected as V3.5 used to be. The CygnusEd version specially built for AmigaOS running on the PowerPC platform, requires AmigaOS 4 to run. Mouse wheel support, which was introduced late in the development process, requires AmigaOS 4, update #4 to work. The installation script will prompt you for confirmation to install the CygnusEd PowerPC version if it finds that the AmigaOS kernel version 50 or higher is installed. 2. Bugs fixed (Please note that this list is by no means complete) - Viewing or editing long lines of text no longer crashes the editor - The cursor no longer gets lost on true/hicolor displays, where it would blend with the highlighted text - String buffer overflow tests have been added, improving overall stability of CygnusEd, MetaMac and RecoverCEDFiles - Ed has been written from scratch because it could not be ported cleanly to the PowerPC and had other stability issues - Cursor rendering has been rewritten from scratch to avoid leaving remnants on non-planar bitmap displays; this means that the graphics card support is more robust than it used to be in earlier versions - An empty startup macro no longer crashed CygnusEd - Comment strings and protection bits are now remembered when a file is loaded and saved later - Views should no longer lose the cursor position and editing information normally printed in the status line - Text output no longer runs into danger of overwriting the output bitmap or text buffers - Direct Amiga blitter usage for text output is now avoided if the blitter is unable to move as much data onto the screen as would be required - It's now possible to have more than 10 CygnusEds running in parallel without having their ARexx MsgPort names come out like "CYGNUSED.:" or "CYGNUSED.;" - The input handler installed by CygnusEd now has a name and no longer attempts to unlink input events - Marks set in lines and columns much larger than 99999 no longer wind up overwriting the icon tool type buffer - The current directory used by CygnusEd is now restored to what it used to be before it exits - The "Launch new CED" menu item function no longer tries to start CygnusEd by assuming that "ced" will reside somewhere on the shell search path; CygnusEd now moves back to the directory it was started from and then launches itself under the name it was started - When splitting a view that covers fewer than three lines, the edit buffer contents are now pushed back to the file first, since otherwise the text shown on the screen could suffer from rendering errors - Replaced the algorithm which chooses the temp file names for the auto-save files; the new code now stops when the temporary file name is unique, and not when a different kind of error occurs - When the auto-save name suffix is added to the file name CygnusEd makes sure that the resulting file name is not longer than 31 characters - Restricted the use of the DeleteDiskObject() function in order to keep file icons from vanishing when files are overwritten - MetaMac now observes the limit on the maximum number of macros that can be edited - OS4 final has (limited) memory protection, which clashed with CygnusEd and MetaMac because they could attempt to modify data in memory which was supposed to remain constant. This affected both loading of macro files and of the ARexx command list. - Trying to centre a line of text could crash if the line was wider than what the right margin permitted. - Ed will no longer attempt to load all files matching a pattern if the TrueMultiAssign patch is active. - The size of the CygnusEd window no longer shrinks when you reopen it. - In CygnusEd shifting out a single of text could fail to work. - CygnusEd no longer deletes auto-save files by accident, mistaking them for something else. - In CygnusEd cut & paste operations that are likely to be undoable due to memory shortage no longer proceed as usual but require a confirmation from the user. - The auto-indent settings are now saved in the configuration file. - The mouse-wheel-assisted scrolling operations can no longer end up getting recorded as macro events. 3. Enhancements (Please note that this list is by no means complete; see the "CygnusEd_Manual.guide" file for a complete description of all features and options) - CygnusEd, Ed, MetaMac and RecoverCEDFiles have been ported to AmigaOS 4. This is the first complete port of all the tools to the PowerPC platform. - The "Ed" command was rewritten from scratch. The complete source code to "Ed" is included in the CygnusEd distribution, for developers to build their own applications upon it. - Literally dozens of bugs have been fixed, ranging from compatibility issues to serious problems which could crash CygnusEd instantly merely by adding a character to a very long line. - The text output engine has been extensively rewritten, fixing old bugs which limited the usable maximum length of a line. The changes also allow for the fast Topaz 80 column font rendering to be used on RTG screens, which was previously limited to native ECS/AGA screens. - The text rendering pens are configurable now and no longer limited to a fixed set of foreground and background colours. - The entire 105 key PC keyboard layout is supported now, including the special function keys Home/End/Page up/Page down/Insert. All keys can be bound to macros. - CygnusEd now supports an optional flashing cursor. - Automatic translation of end-of-line characters both when reading and writing files is supported now. Three different types are recognized: Unix style (line feed ends the line), Apple Macintosh style (carriage return ends the line) and IBM PC style (carriage return + line feed ends the line). CygnusEd can auto-detect which end-of-line character(s) are used, or you can preset the style to be used. CygnusEd remembers which end-of-line style was used when a file was loaded and automatically saves it back in the same style later. - Trailing blank spaces in text files can be automatically stripped when saving files to disk. - CygnusEd now supports an optional progress display which is shown when reading or writing files. This is very useful with slow file system devices, or with networked file systems. - The custom screen settings are now freely configurable and no longer limited to a maximum of four colours per screen. - Auto-indentation is now a configurable feature and is used by default when hitting the Return key. Previously, auto-indent was supported only if you hit the Alt+Return key combination instead. Whether or not the auto-indent feature is enabled is displayed in the view status line. - The maximum length allowed for a file name has been increased in order to support the modern Amiga file systems better which can use file names much longer than the original file systems, which limited path names to 255 characters. - The search & replace text can be up to 500 characters long each; previously, the limit was 100 characters. - The size of the macro recording buffer has been doubled in order to allow for the larger search & replace text to fit into it. Macro recording is now more memory efficient, too. - While entering a macro, CygnusEd now shows the key combination the macro is bound to, and how much room there is still left in the macro recording buffer. Previously, CygnusEd only warned you when the buffer had filled up. - Optionally, CygnusEd can show a warning message if you are about to bind a new macro to an existing key combination, thereby discarding the old macro. - A new safeguard has been added which prevents you from accidentally overwriting an updated file with an older copy: CygnusEd will remember when you last saved a file to disk, and how large that file was. If you save it again and the size or modification time of the file on disk differs from what CygnusEd remembers, you will see a warning message, prompting you to confirm that you want to overwrite the file. - CygnusEd now tries to avoid performing editing operations which it cannot undo due to shortage of memory. - New block transformation functions have been added which strip trailing blank spaces from the lines in the marked text block, and which convert UTF8 sequences into their equivalent ISO 8859 Latin 1 characters. - It is now possible to scroll a view with the mouse wheel, if present. CygnusEd supports both the native AmigaOS 4 mouse wheel feature and the older NewMouse standard. - When loading a file which is already present, CygnusEd now prompts you whether you want to load it again, activate the view into which the file has already been loaded, or cancel the operation. - Mouse-wheel-assisted scrolling now accelerates the longer you turn the wheel. - All requester windows (search & replace, text entry, number entry) are now resizable, and CygnusEd remembers their sizes. - You can now search for text matching regular expressions instead of just for sequences of characters in the text. How regular expressions are constructed is described in the updated documentation. - The new regular expression search also extends to the replacement text, which can use parts of the matching pattern. - CygnusEd can now search and replace text in all currently open files instead of just within the view active at the time you opened the search requester window for. - You can now make CygnusEd start searching for the text or regular expression you entered while you are entering it. This is called "live search". If CygnusEd cannot find what you were looking for, it will signal you briefly, and if could find something, the matching text will be highlighted. - The area to search and/or replace text in can now be limited by the size of the currently highlighted block. - The search can for text or regular expressions can now be made to ignore accents on characters. - Through the use of special key words that appear in the first ten lines of a text file what CygnusEd should do after loading these files. You can change the view settings, the cursor position, the right margin, etc. - You can now tell Ed where to put the cursor when loading a file into CygnusEd. - The copy and paste feature in the text and search & replace requester windows no longer causes the current text to be replaced when you paste the clipboard contents. - CygnusEd can automatically mark the block that matches the search text or regular expression. - All file operations which can overwrite existing files no longer silently replace files but prompt you for confirmation. - When loading an auto-save file, CygnusEd now shows you how large the original and the auto-save file is, and when each file was last changed. - You can now copy or cut a text block and insert it with each line auto-indented like the line the cursor is on. - How large the CygnusEd window is, and where it opens, can now be controlled from the command line. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - 9. Future development ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Not all the enhancement requests submitted made it into this version. The editor and utilities will need further rewriting and maintenance to allow them to be integrated. Current plans are to release updates to the program in the form of patch files, available from Aminet or the CygnusEd home page. Stay tuned. Famous last words: CygnusEd used to be the most pirated Amiga text editor. Development came to a stop in 1993 also because software piracy had made further development unprofitable. Don't let this happen again.
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