vi-like editor for the IBM PC

[Wolf Paul]

In article <776 at microsoft.UUCP> w-colinp at microsoft.uucp (Colin Plumb) writes:
>ked at garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) wrote:
>> MKS (Mortice Kern Systems)
>> 
>> Offers a variety of packages that include vi, awk, and other **IX utilities.
>> These are as close to the "real" thing as you can get under MiSerable Dos.
>
>I'd like to second this recommendation.  You can ^Z out of vi back
>into sh (the Korn shell)!  Everything is wonderfullest!
>
>Here's the list of what's in the "MKS Toolkit":
> ...
>cpio

Very good! It has a (non-standard) option to compress each file before
adding it to the archive; unfortunately limited by the fact that MKS'
compress does not support 16-bit compression. Another limitation is 
that of course, such compressed cpio archives are not directly
unpackable under UNIX -- you have to unpack them, and then manually
run each extracted file through uncompress. Maybe this feature could
be added to afio or pax, or maybe MSK could release the source for
their cpio to the net? But I'd understand if they didn't :-).

>gres	(stolen from MINIX - simple subset of sed)

I don't think that's true -- gres was in my first copy of the Toolkit
about a year before MINIX was published.

I think both the Toolkit and MINIX got both the name and the idea from
an earlier UNIX version.

>init	(reads /etc/inittab and everything)

It even lets you speciy a device other than con for shell i/o -- i.e
start a login on com1, so you can call your machine on the phone.
Only problem with that, last time I tried it, was that it still expected
to read the password from the console keyboard, so you could only
log into accounts without a password that way. Maybe that's been fixed --
comments from MKS?

>login	(uses /etc/passwd and everything)

See note above about password always being read from console

>switch	(lets you use - instead of / as option char in Messy-DOS)

But you should really use their shell rather than COMMAND.COM -- even
with this option.

>uname

Uses the volume label of the boot disk as the node name; the other options
return the DOS version/release and the CPU type

>compress
>uncompress
>zcat

Unfortunately these handle only 12-bit compression and can't handle
UNIX-compressed files (usually 16-bit)

>vi

By itself, worth the price of the Toolkit.


I have no connection to MKS either, except as a satisfied customer.

Wolf
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