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From: george@hyper.lap.upenn.edu (George "Sir Lleb" Zipperlen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: DM-like editor under X11
Summary: Can be done using Text Management Library
Message-ID: <41853@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 23 Apr 91 23:50:24 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Organization: University of Pennsylvania, Language Analysis Project
Lines: 39
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I have about 50% of the the Apollo DM editor working using the Apollo
Text Management Library (TMLib).  The major things that need to be added
are search/replace and mark/region handling.  I don't know how to
handle rectangular regions with wrapping in effect. 

Oh yes, I couldn't get history/UNDO to work.

Also missing is a lot of other DM functionality such as window
management and key re-definition, and the DM command language; as I've
cheated and bound a lot of functions directly to keyboard/mouse events. 

Additional functionality not in the DM
    text cursor distinct from window manager cursor
    8-bit fonts or pairs of 7-bit fonts to get at 
        characters in the range 128-255.
    If you don't mind storing your file as a TMLib object, rather
        than as unstructured text, you can use multiple fonts. 

I've been doing this in spare time -- the real project was a template
oriented multi-lingual dictionary editor. 

If there's interest, I could clean out the dictionary stuff, and post it
here, or in alt.sources in a few weeks.  

TMLib itself is part of the MIT X11/contrib distribution, and needs C++
to compile.  You can do a lot more with it than writing flat editors. 

Any idea how much work it would be to do a DM -like window manger for X?
I can't stand uwm, twm, awm, SunView, Mwm, MacIntosh, Windows3, or any
others I've tried, and I'm stuck using shared-mode X on the Apollo
(slow, and soon to disappear...).  I did like the old Xerox
XDE/ViewPoint environment, though, and SmallTalk is nice too. 

I know the DM editor is addictive, when I ftp files from Suns, NeXTs,
and other beasts to edit them on the the Apollo!
-- 
George Zipperlen    george@hyper.lap.upenn.edu   george@apollo.lap.upenn.edu
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Blatant plug: funky-music-request@hyper.lap.upenn.edu: "Won't be no Static" -JB