Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!hsi!stpstn!cox
From: cox@stpstn.UUCP (Brad Cox)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: vi for the Mac (vs Word or Nisus or ...)
Message-ID: <5974@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 31 Dec 90 19:35:56 GMT
References: <40257@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Reply-To: cox@stpstn.UUCP (Brad Cox)
Organization: Stepstone
Lines: 37

In article <40257@nigel.ee.udel.edu> johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu writes:
}In article <11466@ur-cc.UUCP>, orin@cvs.rochester.edu (Orin Packer) writes...
}>    Can someone point me towards a non commercial vi editor for the Mac?
}
}Stevie 3.69 is a public domain vi -- a Mac binary and source are available
}in the sumex-aim.stanford.edu archives.  A nostalgia trip.  Anybody seen a
}TECO implementation?  I'd still like to 'get' that guy ...

A Macintosh-based vi (or emacs, or...) is hardly a nostalgia trip.

Stevie (I forget which version; an old one) was the first program I
downloaded once I realized that Macintosh WP developers don't see how
regular expressions are useful to 'the rest of us' (Microsoft Word), or
if they do, have not managed to make them run fast enough to be useful
(Nisus). I soon trashed Stevie because it only supports the stuff that
vi does wrong (the user interface), and left out the stuff that vi does
well (the command line facilities; particularly regular expressions).

In case this seems unfair to either Word or to Nisus, I'm still not
recovered from spending most of Christmas trying to remove the markup
commands from an old Interleaf document using Nisus (document size
0.5M; Nisus memory allocation 4.0M).

I consistently discovered that regular expression searches that
routinely took milliseconds under vi/Unix took minutes to *hours* under
Nisus. As I recall, one that took almost forever (I finally gave up
waiting and just left it running overnight) was the Nisus equivalent of
vi's :1,$s/\(\^.\)+/%/g; i.e. replace repeated carets followed
by anything with a single '%' character. Hardly what you'd call exotic!

If anyone has a clue about the reason for such a disparity in speed, or
can propose a solution for such mind-numbing tasks using any Macintosh
tool whatsoever, I would really appreciate hearing from you.
-- 

Brad Cox; cox@stepstone.com; CI$ 71230,647; 203 426 1875
The Stepstone Corporation; 75 Glen Road; Sandy Hook CT 06482