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From: pete@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: If you could have anything in vi ...
Message-ID: <669762020.4478@minster.york.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Mar 91 21:00:21 GMT
References: <1991Mar18.195343.665@cs.widener.edu> <7214@ecs.soton.ac.uk> <7220@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Reply-To: pete@minster.york.ac.uk (Pete Fenelon)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 58

In article <7220@ecs.soton.ac.uk> tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown) writes:
>In <7214@ecs.soton.ac.uk> mrd@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Mark Dobie) writes:
>
>>In <1991Mar18.195343.665@cs.widener.edu> brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) writes:
>
>>> I'm working on a "free" version of vi. It's to fully emulate the
>>>current Berkeley-derived versions. After that, it's prettymuch a
>>>free-for-all.
>>> So .. what would you have added to vi, if you could? What would you
>>>have made an option? What would you change?
>
>>Well, judging by what crops up in this group repeatedly you couldn't
>>go far wrong in providing,
>
>>1) A built in way of justifying text.
>>2) A more flexible way of editing several files and transferring
>>   between them. 
>
>Yes please.  And the ability to edit on columns rather than rows
>would be useful in some circumstances.
>
>Tim

Welllll..... hmmm...... how can you improve on perfection :-)
I'm in two minds about adding to vi -- although it's a great editor there's
always the danger that adding too much to it will make it too big, slow and
unwieldly (for example, I like MicroEmacs, but GNUemacs is ghastly). However,
if I was in an ideal world where memory was free and processors infinitely
fast, here are a few things I'd like (I'm assuming 100% vi compatibility is
retained; these are all ``extras''.)

The first is almost trivial: I'd like to be able to keep a history and
edit my command lines properly! I know there are tricks involving
yanking etc. but a proper history mechanism for ex commands and the
ability to change previously entered commands would be really useful.

Occasionally it would be nice to have proper ``2-D'' editing in vi --
i.e. ability to place the cursor *anywhere* on the screen and overtype -- 
several otherwise totally grotty editors like IBM's PE and PE2 have
the ability to do this, along with the ability to play with arbitrary
rectangular blocks of text.

Also, how about emulating some of the nice features of Intel's AEDIT (a very
nice, but terminally under-rated text editor)...  for example, as well
as the normal vi-type ``objects'' AEDIT allows the user to start a
delete command with 'd', move the cursor arbitrarily around the file
and then complete the command with another 'd'. AEDIT also has a sort
of menu/help line at the bottom of the screen; since vi doesn't use the
bottom line usually this could go in comparatively painlessly.

Optional X11 or SunView support would be nice too -- click somewhere to
move the cursor, some kind of cut/paste/delete mechanism... maybe hooks
to allow menus as well?

Naturally all new features should be completely invisible until explicitly
invoked -- I want vi to look like ``classic'' vi unless I tell it otherwise...

	Pete Fenelon (pete@minster.york.ac.uk)