Xref: utzoo comp.editors:2207 comp.unix.questions:27510 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!dimacs.rutgers.edu!bcm!lib!thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu From: jmaynard@thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu (Jay Maynard) Newsgroups: comp.editors,comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: vi Alternative Required Message-ID: <4448@lib.tmc.edu> Date: 11 Dec 90 16:02:54 GMT References: <1616@ukpoit.co.uk> <7471@castle.ed.ac.uk> Sender: usenet@lib.tmc.edu Followup-To: comp.editors Organization: University of Texas Medical School at Houston Lines: 22 Nntp-Posting-Host: thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu In article joshi@cs.uiuc.edu (Anil Joshi) writes: >Is it that difficult to change vi to emulate ISPF? If so, may be >emacs can do the job (may be a tad slowly). I seriously doubt that either vi or emacs could be made to emulate the ISPF editor, much less perform the other functions that ISPF does. TSO programmers spend more of their time in ISPF than emacs users spend inside emacs. It has an astonishingly rich set of functions, and doing them all would be quite a task. Even the editor is markedly different from the typical Unix screen- oriented text editor; it's a cross between a screen editor and a line editor, and some things are more easily done as line commands (entered in fields at the beginning of each line) than as functions in the text portion of each screen. The model of interaction with ISPF was designed around the capabilities of the 3270-series CRTs instead of character-at-a-time async terminals. The original poster will be better advised to use dte, a WordStar-like editor that appeared recently in comp.binaries.ibm.pc - but with Unix source as well. -- Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can jmaynard@thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu | adequately be explained by stupidity. "...flames are a specific art form of Usenet..." -- Gregory C. Woodbury