Newsgroups: comp.editors
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!scrumpy!bnrmtl@bnr.ca!lewis
From: lewis@bnrmtl.bnr.ca (Pierre Lewis)
Subject: Re: One user's editor wish list
Message-ID: <1991Mar11.163554.21156@scrumpy@.bnr.ca>
Sender: news@scrumpy@.bnr.ca (USENET (SY))
Reply-To: bnrmtl!lewis@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
Organization: Bell-Northern Research Montreal, Canada.
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 16:35:54 GMT

I got quite a few replies to my original post.  Here are a few followup points.

a) vi supports multiple files

   A few wrote saying that vi does support multiple files.  Well, in a way,
   it's true, but it's not quite what I mean.  I think I would say that vi
   supports sequential editing of files (with a rewind possibility (:rew)).
   At any one point, only one file is in memory.  Except for the possibility
   of copying stuff from one file to the next, I see little difference
   between
      vi eins zwei drei
   and
      vi eins ; vi zwei ; vi drei

   What I mean for example is, as I edit say some.c, I go for a minute to
   project.h to add some #define and then come back to some.c in the same
   spot (the editor of course remembers where one was).

b) other editors

   Many people wrote about other editors, especially emacs which in fact can
   be made to behave much like I want.  But this takes quite a bit of initial
   work to learn to set it up properly.  We have it here, many people use it,
   I've tried it, but I find it's too heavy.  Other editors were mentioned
   (JOVE, mined, ...) that I don't know about, in addition to KEDIT (which I
   do know about and forgot to mention - it combines the best of PE2 and
   IBM's XEDIT in one editor).

c) writing your own editor

   What prompted me to write my own editor was an interesting article by
   Dorian P. Yeager, "Customize Your Text Editor" in Computer Language,
   March 1987.  Some points he makes is that you can then have basically the
   same editor in all your environments and port your editor as a way to
   learn a new system (that's exactly what I did when I had to work on
   VAX/VMS recently: I first ported my editor; the painful part was learning
   EVE for the bootstrap).

Otherwise, some people agreed with my preferences, others didn't, which goes
to show that no single editor will ever fill the bill for everyone!  And that's
fine so!

--
Pierre LEWIS
Internet:            bnrmtl!lewis@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU
Alternate Internet:  piotr@pmc.umontreal.ca         (in case all else fails)

P.S.  I'll try (in the next few days - I was away from the office) to reply
to everyone who sent me e-mail directly, otherwise e-mail problems (in or
out) will be the probable cause.