Furthermore, the data storage methods available at the time dictated that text editors operated either on a continuous spool of paper tape containing the entire document, the basic unit of which was the byte, or on a physical stack of punched cards, each holding a line of up to eighty characters, the basic unit of which was the card. Programs could either be set-and-forget i.e., take arguments at startup with no further input or command-line interpreters specialized for a particular task.
As paper is not refreshable, software had to be designed with certain restrictions in mind. Editors that are running through a command-line interpreter, however, may or may not be.īefore the widespread use of glass monitors, computers used display devices that printed on paper. By definition, all visual editors require a re-fresh-able display device and all editors with a GUI are visual.
A visual editor, or full-screen editor is computer software for editing text files using a textual or graphical user interface which displays the content in an easy to look at and good view that is, it displays a portion of the opened file and updates it in real time.
