I am currently working on Microhard Word, a word processor for the TI-86 series of calculators. My goals for the program are to create a good WYSIWYG string editor (very useful for creating BASIC programs that output special text on the home screen), and a decent way to store information such as readmes on the calculator.

Current features:
-Special symbols and five-space indent
-Text input/String Editor
-Text/String viewer
-Document/String saving and backup

So far, I've got the text editor part complete, but still am working out a few little kinks in the viewer. I am also planning to add a help file, support for multiple documents, and perhaps porting it to the TI-83 Plus series.


Main Menu/Title Screen.


Document Viewer. Notice the page indicator in the lower right hand corner.


Viewing a string from an assembly Super Mario game. Look at all the jibberish!


Menu in the document editor.

Looks like you're doing great work! Can you help us understand the difference between the viewer and the editor? Is there a particular reason not to make editing and viewing happen at the same time? It looks like the viewer and the editor both have wordwrap; is the difference that the editor scrolls line-by-line, and the viewer scrolls by pages?

You can view the document while you edit it in Microhard Word, but for speed, memory, and ease of input reasons, the editor is a simple Input. The viewer, on the other hand, allows one to just take a look at the document and read it, scrolling page by page (I wish the input could be better, but in BASIC, I'm afraid it might be more trouble than it's worth).

The viewer has no word wrap, but word wrap would be a good option for me to put in. I'm afraid it just might slow it down a little. The viewer's already not too fast (I'm working on optimizing it).

The main reason behind this program is to create the viewing engine, and make editing strings a little easier for me. While the program's nothing amazing, I'm just making it with convenience and WYSIWYG in mind. I want this program to be a fast and easy way for me to create and work with strings as I write BASIC programs that use the home screen.

Once I've put all the finishing touches in the program, I have plans on including Microhard Word and an on-calc readme file with each piece of software I release.

I think that that last bit is a great idea for two reasons, both for giving people a convenient way to view your programs' readmes, and a good way to promote the use of your Word program. So for input you use a normal string input prompt? How about deleting or inserting characters? I hope that this is going smoothly, and since I purchased a TI-86 that I hope I'm able to fix, I look forward to helping to test!