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From: tuck@iris.ucdavis.edu (Devon Tuck)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Avoiding holy war with the author of COED editor?
Message-ID: <7578@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 21:20:34 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: tuck@iris.ucdavis.edu (Devon Tuck)
Organization: Army Corps of Engineers, Hydrologic Engineering Center, Davis CA
Lines: 35

I need some advice about how you feel special characters "should" be
handled by an editor.

We have an editor here called COED which has a full screen edit mode.  The
author mediated about what to do with special characters when it was
created, and decided that they would simply be printed to the screen and
treaded by the internals of the editor as one character.  Of course this
causes a serious problem when I edit a file that has a tab (Ctrl-I) in it,
for example:

Suppose you have a line of text that starts with one tab, then several
characters following.  When this displays on the screen, it looks fine, but
if I move to the first column and then hit the right arrow key, then in
COED's buffer I am at the first letter following the tab, however on the
screen I am sitting in the middle of a blank "tab field".  If I type a
letter, I clobber the first letter of my line, but on the screen I am still
six characters to the left of it.

It would be nice if the editor treated the tab as a single field, so that
the first right arrow key would move me to the first character that visually
appears on the screen.  The author doesn't want to make this change because
the editor is usually used for FORTRAN and editting files that never
contain tabs.  He claims that if we treated tabs specially we should treat
all characters specially (CTRL-A, CTRL-B, etc). 


What I am looking for is ideas for an elegant, but simple way to handle
special characters.  What do other editors out there do?  I know that Vi
shows tabs as whitespace but only lets your cursor sit on one space in
the tab field, and that other characters are represented as ^A, ^B, etc.

Thanks, your input is important to me,

	Devon Tuck
	tuck@iris.ucdavis.edu