The Interface

Let's start by examining a screenshot of the interface.

editor screenshot

This shows the main user interface. There are two horizontal lines, broken by special symbols every four columns. Between them are eight lines, numbered 0 through 7. Below this is a line showing the current block number, and the current stack contents.

Line numbers are in red; they show which line in the block that the code is on. The code itself is shown in greeen, as is the status information below the block. The horizontal column bars are in grey.

What you type appears below the status bar. You can use any forth code in the input area; the output is displayed below your input line. This allows interactive coding and debugging while editing.

You start the editor simply by running edit. The word exit will quit the editor and return you to normal forth. Now that you have some idea as to what's being shown, let's take a look at how to load and save your code.

We provide several words for selecting, opening, and saving blockfiles. The first of these is use. You can specify a filename to load or save this way easily. Simply do:

use <filename>

And <filename> will become the active file. When you use r (read) or w (write), the contents of the block buffer will be written to this file. To make selecting and loading files easier, we provide a word named load. Use it like:

load <filename>

Then <filename> will be selected and read into the block buffer. Please note that doing load, r, or w will create the file if it does not exist.

The final word we will cover here is blocks. This word specifies the number of blocks to read or write. You can use it like:

12 blocks

The minimum number of blocks is 1; the maximum is 256.