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From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Rich Text and comp.sys.next
Message-ID: <12266@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 90 06:19:03 GMT
References: <4196@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <130125@gore.com> <1990Dec4.045426.28457@ni.umd.edu>
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As the author of MailManager, the good mail reader for the NeXT (not
to be confused with the NeXT system administration program by that
name -- I had the name first from winter 1989), I am very interested
in the comments from Messrs. Gore and Mamakos regarding the desire to
have an EMACS interface instead of the Text object.

At the present time, MailManager uses the Text object, but only
because there is no clean interface between NeXTstep and the
traditional editors (EMACS, vi, etc.).  I would like to change this
state of affairs, but I feel that most of the responsibility lies with
NeXT.

That is, I feel that NeXT should provide this functionality as part of
the Appkit and that application developers should not be required to
implement custom NextStep EMACS or vi interfaces.  I don't think that
customers should have to do NeXT's work for them in providing a basic
functionality.

I've been told repeatedly that there are "EMACS keys" for the Text
object in 2.0, but I doubt that it is anything like a complete EMACS.

I would like to have a true EMACS interface in MailManager.  My
requirements is that it:
 1) must not depend upon any non-NeXT-supplied software (in other
    words, I can't call the Emacs NextStep application since it is
    not distributed by NeXT)
 2) must be in a View in a window I own.  I allow many simultaneous
    windows of many different types, each of which may have editing
    going on.
 3) must allow cut/paste between windows.  Should allow mouse-based
    editor operations *in addition to* normal EMACS/vi/whatever.
 4) RTF editing is nice, but not essential; it would be alright as an
    interim measure to restrict this to fixed-width single font texts.

Ideally, I would like a replacement to the Text object that interacts
with EMACS, and in which each separate invocation talks to a separate
EMACS buffer.  Something similar should be done for vi, but I'm not a
vi hacker so I don't know what that would entail.

Can we as a community get together a reasonable desiderata of what we
need and give it to NeXT as a "must implement"?  I can't believe that
we really want to keep on reinventing the wheel on giving users a
decent editor interface in our applications.

Footnote to Mr. Mamakos: MailManager addresses the compatibility
issues you raise.  Contact me by e-mail if you're interested.  Don't
worry about "lip service" kinds of silliness -- MailManager works hard
to provide function, not "cute."

 _____   | ____ ___|___   /__ Mark ("Gaijin") Crispin "Gaijin! Gaijin!"
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  /|\    | |/\| _______  /  \ FAX: (206) 543-3909     "Iie, boku ha nihonjin."
 / | \   | |__|  /   \  /    \MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU  "Souka. Yappari gaijin!"
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