Speed of text editors on 808x platform

[Jim Leonard]

Dave McGuire wrote:
>   For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS is the big display 
> update bottleneck.  Some programs achieved very fast screen updates by 
> writing directly to the display memory.  The venerable list.com comes to 
> mind.

Most of the ones I tested already write directly to screen ram -- the 
slowdown occurs when the internal structure the text is kept in (partial 
span trees, etc.) is so complex that merely painting the screen by 
traversing the structure is too slow.  The fastest editors usually don't 
have a functional undo because such functionality usually requires 
something slightly more complex than a simple linked list of lines/strings.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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