In 1979, i. e., when Apple II was used widely, a teacher of my high shool asked me to develope a program on Apple II. Because I wanted a program development tool, I developed a small-scale visual editor called BATE, which was written in Basic. I submitted an article on BATE to a magazine called I/O. The copyright of the article is probably owned by Kogaku-sha, but I believe it will not disturb their business by copying the article. So I put a copy here. (You can read the program list but I am sorry the article itself was written in Japanese.) If I submit an article now, I will use my real name, but I used a pen name then.
This program was my first practical program for a PC. With this editor, one can visually edit programs, i. e., one can change a text or a Basic program while looking at it. However, I had almost never used a good visual editor such as vi or emacs at that time. My favorite editor was the editor for Mitsubishi's mainframe computer called Melcom Cosmo 700. With this editor, we could edit a program while looking at about 25 lines, but it was basically a line editor. Because I mimicked this editor, one could edit a text by using commands such as "I" (Insert a line) or "C" (Change part of a line by using string matching).
P. S. Afterword, when I bought a PC9801, which was the NEC's famous PC, I developed and used an editor for PC9801 by rewriting BATE. However, because there was nothing specially new, I did not submit it to a magazine. And after I started using MS/DOS and left Basic untouched, the editor was also gone to somewhere.
A related entry is available.
