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The RetroEditor (RED) is a line oriented block editor orginally written for use with RetroForth. It's a major part of the development environment in RetroForth, and is reasonably portable. See the ports page for implementations for various Forth systems.

The interface, as shown here, provides for the editing of two blocks. The left block is for code, and the right block for comments. Normally these are chained; but you can unchain them with "shadow off"

Please note that in RetroForth, blocks are 16x32, rather than 16x64. This allows blocks to map directly to physical sectors in the native version, and doesn't hinder programming under a host OS. In fact, it's easy to use one block for code and the other as "shadow" block for comments.

Editing commands

block# s Select new block
line# i ... Insert ... onto line#
column# line# ia ... Insert ... onto line# at column#
x Delete the current block
line# d Delete line# from the current block
p Select previous block
n Select next block
v View the current block
e Evaluate the current block

Commands for loading and saving blockfiles

use filename Set the filename to load/save
load filename Set the filename, and load it for editing
reload Read the file to memory
save Write the file to disk

Notes

While editing on a line by line basis can be tedious at times, it's certainly doable, and makes extending the editor very, very simple. See the extensions page for some of these.