It's good to see another system using blocks in place of files.
I keep my hobby notes in a Forth system with 1KB blocks; it's much easier to organize than text files. 1KB works out pretty well for me, but this is with fixed-length lines. Part of the 1KB is inevitably wasted as padding on the ends of lines. 1/2KB with actual newlines would give me almost as much space. I don't have "bulk". Sometimes wish I did, but if I could join blocks like that, I'd end up with something hard to organize again.
Using the first few characters as the name is practical for keeping notes. 10 characters is a little bit short; even old MS-DOS supported 11 characters in total, but I guess it's not bad.
Can you use variables in Picobrain's input state? I use variables to hold block numbers when I'm switching frequently between 3 or more blocks. (I wrote a 'flip' command to switch between 2 blocks, but it's too limited.)
It's interesting that Pikobrain uses the backspace key to terminate programs. Plan 9 uses the delete key, as did many other systems in the 90s. Also in the 90s, most GUI systems had a delete key where the crazy old PC keyboard has backspace. But maybe you knew that.
Personally, I wish the pause/break key was used for termination, but I guess that's getting rare on laptop keyboards.
I was thinking of trying Pikobrain, but then I saw this
terrifying statement in the manual!
Quote:
Boot from the USB. If the boot is sucessfull the screen should change color. Pikobrain is now installed on your hard drive.
So... it boots and installs automatically? The manual doesn't mention giving the user a choice of partitions. (It doesn't mention partitions at all.) Doesn't that mean it's going to overwrite whatever I already have on the hard drive?