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From: flee@gondor.psu.edu (Felix Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: ALL in Xedit (Re: XEDIT capabilities in full-screen editors)
Message-ID: <3089@psuvax1.psu.edu>
Date: Sun, 15-Nov-87 05:49:06 EST
Article-I.D.: psuvax1.3089
Posted: Sun Nov 15 05:49:06 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Nov-87 03:49:00 EST
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Reply-To: flee@gondor.psu.edu (Felix Lee)
Organization: The Roadside Picnic
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In article <1443@ttidca.TTI.COM> lear@ttidca.UUCP (Russell Lear) writes:
> I'm not sure just what the ALL command in XEDIT does, but GNU emacs
> (version 18.47.10) does include the commands delete-matching-lines and
> delete-non-matching-lines that ... well, that delete matching and
> non-matching lines according to a regular expression.

GNU Emacs's "narrow-to-region" is closer in spirit.  The idea is to restrict
editing to a subset of the file.

ALL restricts your editing to a set of lines that match Xedit's idea of a
regular expression.  If you say "ALL /column/ | /row/", all lines that don't
have "column" or "row" will be hidden.  Hidden lines are represented by a
single "shadow line" that says how many lines are hidden.  There's another
simple command that lets you expose the first or last n lines in a shadow
line.  You can also turn off shadow lines.

I just realized that I often use "egrep 'column' *.h *.c" and repeat-search
when what I'd really like is an editor with ALL.  ALL gives you the
information density of egrep and surrounding context on demand.  ALL lets
you hide irrelevant parts of the file and focus on the problem at hand.

ALL is actually a trivial use of a more general Xedit feature that could
support outline processing.  Someone should write a set of easy-to-use
macros to let you do outline processing in Xedit.

I also had another trivial macro that would hide any lines you haven't
changed during that editing session--useful for remembering what you were
doing after wandering off for half an hour.
--
Felix Lee	flee@gondor.psu.edu	{cbosgd,cmcl2}!psuvax1!gondor!flee