Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!udel!mmdf
From: MROBINSON@wash-vax.bbn.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: vi versus emacs regexps?
Message-ID: <21646@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 14 Aug 89 14:54:14 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 47


isearch-regexp and its cousins work great in the GNU Emacs I've used on Sun
workstations.  My only complaint about Emacs is that its too slow, but its not
as slow as some editors that do a lot less.  I have two gripes with vi: one,
its not easy to extend like Emacs, and two, its too difficult to find out what
a command does; a help command of some sort would be very nice.

When I programmed in Prolog for a couple years, I used GNU Emacs nearly all the
time, and vi only once in a while, when I had something I knew exactly how to
do real fast in vi, that I would have to think about in Emacs.  Since I've
changed jobs, I've been programming in C and using vi almost exclusively.  The
feature of vi that helps me more than anything for C programming is finding the
matching (){}'s with by typing % in command mode.  If this was as easy in
Emacs, I might still be using Emacs, even though it is slower.  Of course, GNU
Emacs has a very good vi emulation mode, in case I would get homesick...:)

Most of you will probably think I'm sick, but one of the things I like about
vi (actually, ex) is the line-specification syntax.  Like,

.	current line
$	last line in the file
/<pattern>/	first line forward containing the given pattern
?<pattern>?	first line backward containing the given pattern
<line>+<line>	(<line>+<line>)th line in the file
<line>-<line>	obvious from above

And ranges of lines are <line>,<line> or just <line>.  These really help one
move around and specify what should change.  Anybody else like these?  The
reason I ask is that I've given some thought to the idea of having this kind of
position specification model at the *character* level, rather than the line
level as in vi, and building a (freely redistributable, of course) editor
around this idea.  The position specification model is complete, and I have a
fairly good idea about what I want the editor to do, and how I want to
structure the code, and all, but is it worth the doing?  Is DME really the
be-all and end-all of editors, or would someone actually be interested in this?
I'm likely to do it one way or another, the question is when.

Also, I've never written an editor before, and I was wondering if anyone has
opinions about how an editor should handle memory, especially on the Amiga.
Should the editor work on blocks of text, or just shove everything into one
big buffer?  And what special interface concerns have people noticed with
editors?  Keymaps, raw keyboard input, color of the text, color of the cursor,
clicking on text, multi-buffer windows versus multi-windowed editor, online
help, mapping keys to commands, macros?

Thanks for any input,
  Max