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From: adam@mtund.UUCP (Adam V. Reed)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Editor macro languages
Message-ID: <798@mtund.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 12-Oct-86 23:58:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: mtund.798
Posted: Sun Oct 12 23:58:50 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Oct-86 06:32:13 EDT
References: <4508@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: AT&T ISL Middletown NJ USA
Lines: 29

Kenneth Ng:
> Now for a little soap box time.  It seems to me that one of the
> most powerful features of a text editor is the ability to write
> custom programs with a language the editor can understand.  The
> three editors mentioned above have such features.  Therefore
> practically any needed function can be added easily.  This is the
> one feature I find so lacking in VI(1).  The macro facility kinda
> has this, but I haven't seen the functionality of a real programming
> language in this editor.

Not unless you consider C, and the Korn shell, and every language
available under Unix [tm], something other than "real" programming
languages. The "!" command (which can be included in map micros) lets you
filter any subset of a file through any pipeline. For example, the vi
command to alphabetize lines 23 through 77 is ":23,77!sort^M". There is
nothing to stop you from writing a custom C program to use in vi macros,
but usually there already are Unix tools around to do the job. Note that
the output of a filter can be placed in a buffer and executed (there are
spelling correction macros that use this capability).

Being able to use the shell, or a programming language of one's
choice, instead of having to learn a custom editor macro language,
is one of the tremendous advantages of working under Unix. I once
implemented a syntax-directed editor as a set of vi macros filtering
text through a few shell scripts and one C program, in a quarter of the
time it would have taken to write an SDE from scratch. When a novice
complains that some part of Unix is not powerful enough, the cure
is RTFM.
					Adam Reed