That is missing context. What program are you running? Where are you entering text? What kinds of text manipulation are you doing?gerard@dugdill.com wrote: ↑Sun 05 Oct 2025, 16:32 I found the whole way of inputting and manipulating text clunky, slow/delayed and a bit un-responsive, eg compared to word processing in Word.
As you refer to word processing perhaps you are talking about the editbox.bbc library, which is probably the closest thing to that functionality available in BBCSDL, but that is purely a guess.
It's stating the obvious, but Word isn't written in an interpreted language so it's hardly surprising if it's faster than something that is!
All I can say is that I use BBCSDL all the time, BB4W holds little interest for me now. Something that I really dislike about BB4W is the list of functions and procedures in a program (which you get by right-clicking in the program editor), which crucially is not alphabetically sorted. This means that in a large program with hundreds of such functions it's almost impossible to find the one you are interested in. Horrible.
Another thing I dislike about BB4W is that your BASIC program runs in the same process as the IDE. So if your program crashes for any reason - and BBC BASIC programs are prone to crashing because of the low-level operations the language supports - the IDE crashes too! A silly design decision in retrospect; in BBCSDL your BASIC program runs in a separate process.
They are just two things which show how a tool written 25 years ago has shortcomings compared with more recent developments.
Yes, but as I said you can change the font and size to anything you like. The only time you necessarily encounter the default font, which you can't change, is when operating in Immediate Mode. But in neither BB4W or BBCSDL are you expected to do much in that mode (perhaps some debugging, but little else).What I meant was the font size in the output window in BBC4W; it just seems tiny, maybe 9-10 pt, when I run a sample program, eg from chapter 6 of the user's manual (strings).
And don't forget MODE 7, which has always been the best standard mode to use for text clarity (even on the BBC Micro), I'm sure you don't feel that the font in that mode is "tiny"! Incidentally that's another of my pet hates: In BB4W MODE 7 doesn't use the proper 'teletext' font, whereas it does in BBCSDL.
How many of the example programs supplied with BBCSDL use the default output font? Hardly any!