The Editor

The editor (called RetroEditor or RED) plays a big role in RetroForth. It's the primary tool for editing blockfiles in the library, and allows a clean, easy to learn way to save and edit code within the RetroForth environment.

This editor is not new. It's been around since the days of RetroForth 4, but never has it been this closely integrated into RetroForth as a whole. It will take you a bit of practice to become proficient at editing since RED is line-oriented.

Blocks in RetroForth are 512 bytes. This gives you 8 lines with 64 characters per line. In most Forths blocks are 1024 bytes. We have some reasons for shorter blocks (for starters they seem to encourage better factoring; for another they map directly to physical sectors in the Native and L4 versions).

So let's take a look at it, and see how to use actually use it.