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SemWare Editor is now Freeware

Aug
1,917
68
SemWare Editor is now Freeware, both for the 32-bit Text User Inferface, and the 32-bit GUI Interface.

The version is 4.47 September 2022.

SemWare homepage

Joe
 
Woof. That's definitely a blast from the past. I remember editing the first 4DOS configuration files with QEdit.

I'm just doing my month-end finances. I bought QEdit v2.08 on October 3d, 1989 for $22. Invoice #6424. I preferred Kedit (and still do, to this day), but in the days of 82086 and 80386 PCs, it took a long time to start up, where QEdit ("quick edit") could load a 50kb file, make the change, save it to disk, and exit in less time than Kedit took to load. Once OS/2 and then Win95/2K/XP/etc. took over, QEdit got mothballed, but it was a great little editor for its' time.
 
I still use it daily (from the QEdit times, too, with a student license). Some of TSE's incredibly useful features (starting with its high degree of programability and customizability, and its ability to open absurdly large text files) remain unduplicated in other editors, not to mention its light, light weight.

TSEPro's only real problem is that it does not support Unicode (for which I use notepad++). Although... that can be made into a strength, in some cases.
 
While we're being nostalgic ... Does anyone remember how they first heard of 4DOS? I first used 4DOS with MSDOS (v5 or v6) but I can't remember how I heard of it.
 
This extension enables TSE to recognize and edit files for all major Unicode encodings:

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, including their variants; big endian (BE) and little endian (LE), and with or without a byte order mark (BOM).

Carlo's TSE page
 
While we're being nostalgic ... Does anyone remember how they first heard of 4DOS? I first used 4DOS with MSDOS (v5 or v6) but I can't remember how I heard of it.
I was working in a PC and Vax environment, and we were trying to script a number of things. There was DCL on the Vax side, but the basic DOS scripts were too limited, and we were looking to automate our build process.

So, we started looking. Back then, that meant reading Byte, PC Mag, PC Week, PC World, and whatever other computing magazines we could find. It also meant asking on the bulletin board systems (BBSes). 4DOS was one of the ones that showed up in our search.

We looked at things like the MKS Toolkit and a couple of other Unix-based scripting setups, but they were too heavy for the PCs of the day, and/or depended on Unix features that DOS lacked (like background tasks). There was something called VCL, which was a PC DOS version of DCL, but it was too immature. So was GNU.

There were two command.com based/compatible scripting options that we looked at. One was "Command Plus", which appears to be lost in the mists of time. The other was 4DOS.

The Command Plus stuff looked good, and had some features that 4DOS lacked. However, it was buggy as hell, as I recall, and everything was promised to be fixed in the patch release next month, well two months, okay three months, well, six months, because we're going to add XYZ, well, maybe another six weeks, etc.

4DOS wasn't quite as polished in those days, but it was extremely stable. We bought a few copies for the department, but then they migrated everything off the PC to the Vax anyway, making it irrelevant.

I, however, bought a personal copy, and stuck with it. Like Kedit and Windows Commander (now Total Commander), it's one of the tools that I've been using for over 30 years now.
 
Byte, PC Mag, PC Week, PC World, and whatever other computing magazines we could find. .
You forgot to mention

Dr Dobb’s Journal (Running Light Without Overbyte)
Micro Cornucopia

I used Kedit on VM, but never spent the money to buy a copy for the PC. I was a big user of Qedit, later TSE, but when I was forced into Unix in 1991, VIM became my goto and has been ever since.
 
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