Text Editor on Propeller?
User Name
Posts: 1,451
I'm trying to get away from TeraTerm on a Windows7 laptop as my primary terminal for <something>. Keyboard entry, video display, cut/paste, load/save, and Xon/Xoff serial transfer are all that would be needed. Have these features ever been integrated on the Prop? Do any of the FORTH implementations offer this capability? (I suppose the ultimate fall-back would be CP/M on a Z-80 emulation, but it would be lovely to have something more au courant.)
Comments
... Roundabout ....
Yup. :-)
There's no problem with doing a text editor for a Forth, it's just that the Prop is a microcontroller with 32k RAM both for program and data, where do we fit everything? However I have an implementation that use a small VGA text mode and assumes you have SD etc. I was intending to wait until I released the target resident OBEX where modules could be loaded from EEPROM/SD at runtime.
The propforth jupiter ace code has keyboard, vga, two terminal sessions. We could connect the SD card and have multiple gig of storage but I never got around to doing it, it should be straight forward. Ron Sutcliffe was doing a text editor specifically, but he dropped from sight a while back.
I am leaning more toward using an android device for screen and key board. All you need is HC05 bluetooth on the prop serial pins and you're good to go. And you can talk directly to forth on the prop, or use the prop to talk to whatever device. The prop has to be physically connected to the device, but then the connection is wireless to the android. I use blue term, its free. I use this to talk to the SF02, when demoing it stand alone on batteries away from the PC or bot.
If you're still interested in trying spinix it contains 4 text editors -- vi, ed, ted and pfth ted. vi and ed are the standard unix editors. ted is a tiny version of ed with a limited command set. pfth ted is a Forth implementation of ted. I normally run spinix using a terminal program on a PC. If you want to be untethered from the PC you would need a dumb terminal.
I love the whole concept of SPINIX as it allows a Forth platform with a file system on SDcard storage and interactive programing with an interpreted language instead of a compile, load, and run cycle.
In my case, I used two Propeller Proto Boards and one is simply an VT100 emulating dumb terminal with PocketTerm firmware and the other board is a generic ProtoBoard with a MAX232 added. You could go further and drive a serial compatible printer if you really need printout.