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From: CHRIS@ENGVAX.SCG.HAC.COM.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: RE: vi written in TPU
Message-ID: <8704300531.AA01803@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 28-Apr-87 22:04:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8704300531.AA01803
Posted: Tue Apr 28 22:04:00 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 1-May-87 06:46:14 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 54

>>Does anyone know of a version of vi written in TPU?  If so, is it available
>>   thru DECUS?  Over the net?
>
>My GOD! Why would you want to DO such a thing :-) ?!? It's like running CP/M
>on a Macintosh (I use both).
    :
>/kenw

     You know, I thought the same thing when I saw the original posting,
but I also know that editors, operating systems, et al. are like religions.
Everybody has their own favorite that they are used to.  To them, that
entity is familiar, they know how to work with it, and to accept anything
different would just be too much to deal with.  My motto is "never make fun
of another person's editor".

     I know somebody who hacked VI into Unipres Emacs so that they would
have a "decent" editor on VMS, and somebody who hacked VTEDIT into TPU
(starting with the EVE source) only a year or two after having hacked it
into Unipres Emacs so that they could use that old friend.  In case you're
wondering, VTEDIT's base ancestor was TECO, I understand that it was a full
screen version of said editor.

     Me, I'm an old EDT hacker, but I also love having more than one window
on the screen at once (4 or 5 if the )(&(*%&^$ screen is big enough!) so I
started with EVE V 1.000 and combined in the VTEDIT TPU source mentioned
above, Kevin Oberman's preliminary EDT keypad definitions for EVE and the
rectangular cut and paste routines from the EDTPLUS (EDTSECINI.TPU based)
routines by Portia Shao and friends.  'Course, I also figured out EVE's
nifty HELP routines and modified them slightly so that they would use a
help library other than the TPU help library and wrote help for all of it.
Some of the important features include:

1) n (where n = (screen-length-2)/2) window capability,
2) full EDT keypad *feature* compatability (no functionality on the keypad
    lost, but some slight changes to the REPEAT, REPLACE, and
    SPECIAL_INSERT commands),
3) full EVE command compatability,
4) a host of routines like rectangular cut and paste,
5) routines that sort and spell a selected region or buffer (providing that
    from a subprocess you can issue the command SORT or SPELL <filename>
    and expect the output to go to a file of the same name, but one version
    higher).
6) Padding and trimming routines (actually, this was just a case of
    liberating these from EVE so that the user could get at them).

     At any rate, it's on (or at least it should be on...) the Spring 87
DECUS VMS SIG tape.  Those SIG tapes have more interesting PD software on
them than any one person could hope to ever find use for that I wouldn't
know what to do without them!  Contact your Local Users Group for
information on how to obtain the SIG tape, but since DECUS is *this* week
(I didn't get to go, sniffle) don't expect to see the Spring 87 tape for a
couple of months.

                                -- Chris