What We Didn’t Have For Amiga Development
285 words.
While using Cloanto’s Amiga Forever to massage the source code for Rend24 into something that actually compiles*, I was amazed at the basic functionality we had to live without during the time I did Amiga development.
- Undo!? I can’t believe it, but TurboText does not have a traditional undo! Goodbye, old reliable CTRL-Z. (You can undo deleted lines, but that’s it.)
- Home, End, PgUp and PgDn. It’s shocking how much I’ve relied on these keys since I switched to Windows.
- Scroll Wheel. Cloanto kindly provided an implementation for the mouse scroll wheel in their emulator, but we didn’t have one on Amiga mice.
- Shift-highlighting. Holding down shift and moving around does not highlight text. How did we copy and paste?!? I honestly can’t remember.
- Click-to-front. Amiga windows do not come to the front when you click on them like they do in Windows (unless you run some extra software). Again, it’s amazing how much you get used to it.
- Automatic saving preferences. Before Windows, we had to explicitly tell the computer to save our preferences to disk after changing them in the program. What a pain.
- Any kind of IDE. Yep, we had to run a text editor on a specific file and then type “make” to compile things. Actually that’s no so bad, really. It forces you to be a more thoughtful, disciplined programmer.
In short, I can’t imagine doing Amiga development on an actual Amiga anymore. If only there was a way to edit, compile and link source code on a PC and then copy the binaries over to the Amiga. If, you know, there was any reason to compile Amiga binaries, that is.
- I don’t know why I was doing it, either.
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