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From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DME (was Marketing suggestion for C-A)
Message-ID: <8706260802.AA10341@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Fri, 26-Jun-87 04:02:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: ingres.8706260802.AA10341
Posted: Fri Jun 26 04:02:44 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jun-87 07:51:28 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 51
Summary: Some potentially helpful information

In article <4401@ihlpa.ATT.COM> qix@ihlpa.ATT.COM (Puckett) writes:
>I use DME exclusively now.  Although it lacks many of the features of
>microEMACS, it is extensible (perhaps if I had a full-blown EMACS...).
>    [...]     DME can be configured to fit my idiosyncracies, which
>makes it a lot more useful than any highly customized but closed editor.
>Also, DME is fairly small.

This is not intended as a flame, but I have some information about DME
that might make you think twice.

Initially I was very enthusiastic about DME, and started using it
exclusively, and I liked its features, and was willing to reserve
judgement about certain lacks, since Matt was creating updates.

But then I found that DME destroys some white space information that is
critical to some text files. It *always* optimizes white space into
either spaces or tabs (you can pick one or the other), and you can't
prevent this.

Thus, for instance, blanks at the end of lines in a UUENCODED file will
*always* be removed, which makes them impossible to decode correctly
until the blanks have been added back in using another editor. And programs
that have quoted strings containing literal blanks and tabs can be changed.
The latter caused one program that I edited and recompiled to misformat
columns that it printed.

I discussed this via email with Matt, and he says that 1) this behavior
is intrinsic to DME and only a total rewrite could fix it, and 2) for
his own reasons he thinks that this behavior is desirable.

I strongly disagree; I don't think that editors should feel free to
destroy information in text files. Matt on the other hand doesn't think
that files with UUENCODED information should be edited on the Amiga;
he says that he handles uuencodes on Unix and then downloads, so it's
not a problem for him. He didn't say what he does about white space in
quoted strings, but presumably he doesn't mind fixing formatting bugs
in programs caused by his editor.

There were some other things I was hoping to see as well, but they
were, I suppose, a matter of taste. Just for the record, I would be
delighted to see an editor that supports undo and full regular expression
search and replace.  The other issues that cause people to get into
religious wars aren't as important.

Meanwhile I have switched back to another editor that I enjoy less,
but at least can be trusted to handle my files safely. Anyone using
DME or considering using DME should decide whether this issue is
important to them *before* they get hopelessly hooked on it (the
transition was difficult, DME does have some nice features that I was
sad to give up).
	Doug Merritt		ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug