Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!mucs!m1!bevan From: bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: Wordstar-like editor for Unix Message-ID: Date: 20 Sep 90 15:06:26 GMT References: <1299@infko.UUCP> <8732@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Lines: 58 In-reply-to: wyle@inf.ethz.ch's message of 20 Sep 90 07:42:10 GMT In <8732@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle) writes :- > All of these "great" emulation packages for the different emacsen have the > same untenable problems: > > 1) emacs is still underneath the emulation. You still need > control-meta-alt-shift-compose-diamond-clover-cokebottle-V > to give commands. What commands? Wordstar does most (all?) of its commands via the control key so I don't see how that is any different. > If you accidentily type > control-meta-alt-shift-compose-diamond-clover-pepsibottle-V > you are blasted into some bizare emacs twilight zone where it forked three > times, and is loading 12 Gigabytes of hypertext help in the background. This only happens if you layer the WordStar keys over the Emacs ones. If you use empty keymaps to start with, all you'll get is a message when you press something you shouldn't. > When you search for text, the cursor jumps around while you type. Only if you bind the WordStar search function directly to isearch-forward rather than search-forward. Acutally binding it to search-forward is a bit naive there is a lot more processing you need to do before acutally doing the search. > When you save a file, a command line appears. Sorry don't understand this. When I save a file all it does is tell me the name of the file it has saved. You can even get rid of that if you really want to. > Emacs is still there. You are *not* in wordstar. I would have thought this is rather obvious. If you define it on top of vi then :- `vi is still there. You are *not* in wordstar' So what? > 2) Since it's emacs, you have to wait a few years til it's your turn to > type at it. If you are running on a cray-2 and ram disk, response time > approaches vi. Well it runs quite nicely on my machine, but then again it is a SPARCstation! Stephen J. Bevan bevan@cs.man.ac.uk PS. I *have* written a WordStar mode for Emacs. I just need to work out how to deal with the help screens, before I post it. PPS. I think WordStar is almost as bad an editor as vi and never use the mode myself. I only wrote it for somebody else.