Post #4398560

A bit of teenage-programmer nostalgia: I recently remembered about, and dug out, the basic WYSIWYG word processor which I wrote in my teens, for my own use and the rest of my family if they wanted it. It ran in VGA text mode, because I had a manual telling me all the obscure control bits you can set in a VGA to make it do less usual things. You can make one of the colour bits in a character cell do double duty to select between two 256-char fonts, so that you can have 512 distinct glyphs. I decided the right way to use those was as 128 logical characters × 4 combinations of underline and italic. (Drawing an italic font in a VGA 9×16 cell isn't much fun.) This limited the colour support, because now I only had 3 bits left for colours, so I was only able to support black, white and (arbitrarily) red and green, plus bold versions of each. Because I had a collection of documents written in this system, I ported it to run in an X window shortly after I became a Linux user. The rendering is identical to the VGA version, however (except for the lack of a flashing cursor). 1/3