Design references for leap, taken from the Jef Raskin collection on the
Internet Archive. The Canon Cat was
Jef Raskin's "Most Usable System" — its LEAP-key editing model is the design
north star for this project.
The PDFs themselves are not committed (~270 MB total; see .gitignore).
Re-download them from the source URLs below with curl -fL -o <file> <url>.
| File | What it's good for | Source |
|---|---|---|
Cat-Reference-Guide.pdf |
Official 1987 user manual — the UI/behavior reference (LEAP keys, editing model). | https://archive.org/details/CatReferenceGuide |
Technical-Documentation-Canon-Cat-Editor-Sep88.pdf |
Editor internals: routines & data structures, written in tForth. Most relevant to the buffer-data-structure work. | https://archive.org/details/TechnicalDocumentationForTheCanonCatEditorSep88 |
Cat-On-Line-Tutorial.pdf |
The Cat's built-in interactive tutorial text — intended user-facing workflow. | https://archive.org/details/CatOnLineTutorial |
Canon-Cat-How-to-Guide-1987.pdf |
Task-oriented how-to guide. | https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_informatioatHowtoGuide1987_51033849 |
Cat-Workshop-Manual.pdf |
Hardware/service manual. | https://archive.org/details/CatWorkshopManual |