bigFORTH is a fast x86 implementation of the ANS Forth language. It
comes with a GUI, MINOS, and an embedded screen and stream file
editor. It also works nice with Emacs, using gforth.el from Gforth. It
offers a number of nice features, like history, input completion,
backtraces, a decompiler, object oriented extensions and so on.

bigFORTH is a native code compiler. bigFORTH is distributed under the
GNU General Public license (see COPYING). Please add yourself to the
CREDITS file if you change something and redistribute.

You can get the official distributions from

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth.html
http://bigforth.sourceforge.net/

If you want to get bigFORTH/MINOS for Linux, get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-<version>.tar.bz2

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

Get also bigforth-pattern-<version>.tar.bz2 if you want background
styles, and bigforth-edata-<style>-<version>.tar.bz2 for Enlightenment
styles (scaled pixmaps).

To install bigFORTH, unpack all packages into a directory of your
choise, cd into the generated subdirectory bigforth-<version> and type
in

./configure
make
make install

the latter with the appropriate rights to write into the install
directory. configure accepts the usual options of a GNU autoconf
configure, such as --prefix=<install-path>. Default is /usr/local.

You'll see some ignored errors on the first make, when the compiler
tries to backup generated bigFORTH images - these images haven't been
generated. You can ignore these errors.


If you want to run MINOS on Windows 2k/XP, get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-<version>.exe

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

and double-click on that file. This is a self-extracting archive, that
installs as other Windows programs.


If you have a Debian system, you can also get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-<version>.deb

and install it with dpkg.


MINOS consists of two parts: a widget library (also called MINOS), and
an editor, the tool to master MINOS, called Theseus. To load MINOS,
start "xbigforth" and click on "Theseus" in the "File" menu.

This opens Theseus. To arrange objects, MINOS uses a box&glue
model. Each dialog starts with a box (usually a vertical box, vbox,
you can change this with the "horizontal" button in the box
inspector); add all the widgets you want there. To navigate within the
boxes (one box is the current box), use the four cursor buttons in the
icon bar, or click on the box.

The top three icons select the editing mode: Text/Code/Name, Cut/Paste
and Try. The four icons below change the appending order of new
objects: First in the current box, last in the current box, before the
current object, after the current object. The three lower icons allow
you to load, save and execute the current form. Another "designer
open" in the dialog window opens another incarnation of Theseus.

There is a help file, which explains a bit more detailed how to use
Theseus. You can view the help with your favourite HTML browser, set
the shell variable BROWSER accordingly. Default is
"netscape". "kdehelp" works fine, too.

To see some of MINOS features, type "include testwidgets.fs" in the
dialog window, or "include gears.m gears open".


More informations about MINOS can be found in the article

http://bernd-paysan.de/minos-eng.ps.gz