Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!njin!njitgw.njit.edu!hertz.njit.edu!ken From: ken@hertz.njit.edu (ken ng cccc) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: Xedit is better than vi and emacs Message-ID: <1991Apr16.193558.9369@njitgw.njit.edu> Date: 16 Apr 91 19:35:58 GMT References: <2197@pdxgate.UUCP> Sender: news@njit.edu Distribution: usa Organization: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, N.J. Lines: 85 Nntp-Posting-Host: hertz.njit.edu In article<2197@pdxgate.UUCP> jonr@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Jon Edmund Richards) writes: : for awhile with the end result that by Friday I have to : present a paper either supporting my belief that Xedit : has outlived its usefulness or a description of how Xedit : surpasses my favorite Unix editors. Good luck. When I first started learning VM after learning Unix, I thought Xedit was a real joke. But after getting to learn how to use it, I found that it provided much functionality that vi sorely lacked. : Can any of you explain to me : the advantages of Xedit and why it's a good editor? Good is relative, I use Xedit, vi, MS Word, and several other editors daily. Each is good for certain jobs, each is absolute crap for others. To answer the question of in what areas Xedit is better than vi, I would say: very good integration with all the tools, ability to set ranges and have to work performed only on the ranges requested (and keep the surrounding material), simultanous screens (although not nearly as programmable as a windowing system), and a REAL macro language (vi's :map doesn't cut it). The last entry, a real macro language, is, in my opinion, the single most important feature. It is the ability to put in anything that the designers didn't, or to really customize various facilities. There are a few things I think could easily be put into vi but are not in there currently (or I have yet to find them). For example, is there a way to do a case insensitive search? I find '/[Ss][Tt][Uu][Ff]' to be a real drag (In Xedit, just do a 'set case m i'.). A retrieve facility on the ':' would also be VERY nice (could you throw in line editing as well?) I don't know how many times I wanted to try something from vi but was off by one character (In xedit just set up a function key to do a retrieve, or, prefix the command with '&' and the command stays on the command line.) And lastly, sometimes I WANT BLANKS when I hit in insert mode with autoindent enabled. I have yet to find a documented switch that enables that. (Note: none of these are flames, if there is an easy way to do them, I would like to know so I can use them.) Back when I was more active under VM, I made major uses of Xedit's ability to selectively hide text. For example: local documentation standards dictated a documentation page at the beginning of each function. Most of the time I didn't want to have to see it, so I just programed my profile to search for and hide that section. If I wanted to see it, I just told xedit to display everything. Another use: when writing Pascal routines, I would use Xedit's hide facility to hide the implementations of subroutines I was writing. Mostly I would page up to get the declarations of the various routines, most of the time I had no interest in how the routines worked, I just wanted to see the orders of the parameters, arguement types and return values, etc. I wrote an Xedit macro to hide from the 'begin' to the 'end' of each routine (getting recursion to work was fun :-)). In that way, when I needed a routine definition, I just paged through the definitions, not the bloody routines themselves each and every time. Selectively hiding text could also be used as a primitive database. I used to have many flat files and would fire up xedit and do an 'all/ugga/&/booga/' to show me all lines that had 'ugga' and then 'booga' or lines with 'booga' and then 'ugga'. Or I would say 'all/ugga/&^/booga/' to show all lines with 'ugga', but not 'booga' (Granted this one you can do with 2 greps, but I don't think you could do the first with just grep.) And, once I have that set of database hits, I can expand the surrounding text around those areas that look interesting, and still keep the rest 'non-hit' text hidden. -------------------------------------------------------------- JUST to make sure you folks don't think that I think Xedit is the greatest program in the world, here is the other side: Lack of real regular expressions. In spite of their line noise appearance, sometimes regular expressions are useful. While Xedit does have the arbchar facility, it is somewhat lacking (although you COULD write one in REXX, since REXX has true if/then/else macro cabability :-)). Better scrolling capabilities. With 3270 style screens, this is going to be forever locked. However, with Mansfield's KEDIT, the scrolling is quite acceptable. Xedit lacks vi's ability to work on words directly (ie 'cw'). But on the other hand, that is partly what lends to vi's cryptic nature. Now, here is my question, in your report, are you going to include both the good and bad points about Xedit, or just the bad ones? PS: to the gnu emacs on 386 box users, does anyone have a mod that will enable me to use the instead of the key as the meta key? I think that will make the balance between and key better.