User Do you familiar with the GoldEd Fidonet message editor? ChatGPT
Yes, I'm familiar with GoldEd, a popular message editor for FidoNet. FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSs). It was most popular during the 1980s and early 1990s, before the widespread adoption of the Internet. GoldEd is one of the many software tools developed for FidoNet users, designed for creating and editing messages to be sent over the network.
GoldEd is known for its extensive feature set, including a powerful text editor, support for multiple message areas, and a range of configuration options to tailor the user experience. It was designed to work with various message bases (the format in which messages are stored) and to be highly customizable to fit the needs of different users. Over the years, there have been several versions and forks of GoldEd, including GoldEd+ (GoldEd Plus), which incorporated additional features and improvements.
User Is it possible to adopt GoldEd to support unicode? ChatGPT
Adopting GoldEd to support Unicode would be technically possible but would require significant modifications to the program. The original GoldEd was developed during a time when Unicode was not widely adopted or supported, and it was primarily designed to work with the character encoding standards of the time, such as ASCII and possibly extended ASCII for specific locales. Unicode support would allow the editor to handle a much wider range of characters from virtually all written languages, which would be a significant improvement for global communication.
To add Unicode support to GoldEd, several key areas of the program would need to be updated:
Text Storage and Processing: The internal mechanisms for storing, retrieving, and processing text would need to be updated to handle Unicode characters. This could involve significant changes to the way messages are stored in memory and on disk.
User Interface: The user interface would need to be capable of displaying Unicode characters correctly. This might involve updates to the text rendering engine and ensuring compatibility with fonts that support a wide range of Unicode characters.
Input Methods: Support for input methods that allow users to type characters from various languages not directly supported by their keyboard layouts would be necessary.
Message Encoding: When sending and receiving messages via FidoNet or other networks, the software would need to ensure that Unicode messages are correctly encoded and decoded. This could involve implementing support for UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding scheme and ensuring compatibility with systems that may not support Unicode.
Compatibility: Maintaining backward compatibility with existing messages and systems that do not support Unicode would be an important consideration. This might involve implementing features to automatically detect and convert between different encoding standards.
Given that GoldEd is an older software, making these changes would require access to the source code and a good understanding of both the software's architecture and Unicode standards. It would be a non-trivial project that would likely involve a substantial amount of work. However, if there is a strong demand within the FidoNet community or among users of similar systems, and if developers with the necessary skills and interest can be found, it's certainly within the realm of possibility.
Hу и дальше отличается.
Best regards, dp.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20230304 * Origin: All is good in St. John's Wood (2:5001/100.1)
