41-CX's "ED" gets a facelift

[Ángel Martin]

Announcing special character support for "ED", the built-in ASCII file editor on the 41-CX

Some of you (Michael Fehlhammer, Garth Wilson, et al) have asked about this for months, and until recently I doubted it could be easily accomplished; but a series of recent bemusing explorations provided fruitful and yielded some ideas to get it done - so here it is at last...

Using the enhanced "ED+" all special characters can be entered in the ASCII record displayed by switching ALPHA off (yes, you read correctly) and pressing the designated keys. These loosely match the same layout as the OS/X (or CCD) ALPHA keyboard with USER off (also known lower-case mode). Note that at this point there's no support for lower case letters though, only for the special characters.

BTW with this enhancement you can enter in an ASCII file all possible characters involved in the formula definitions in the EVAL_1F module - this was one of the driving forces to delve into ED, instigated by Mark Fleming...

As to how to get it in your system, well whatever you use needs to support OS changes. This is easy on V41, just replacing the ROM file for the bank-switched XFNS in page #5. It's also possible on the real-life CL performing an OS update.

The updated ROM will be posted in a couple of days, as soon as the beta testing is finished.

Cheers,
ÁM

Edited: Direct typing of Lower Case is also being added - to visualize them on a half-nut you need the patch prepared by JF-Garnier a while ago, posted here: http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/...?read=1205