Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!uwmcsd1!bbn!spdcc!merk!alliant!cantrell From: cantrell@Alliant.COM (Paul Cantrell) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: Is your editor manly enough to edit itself? Message-ID: <2374@alliant.Alliant.COM> Date: 16 Sep 88 22:34:07 GMT References: <1414@spp2.UUCP> Reply-To: cantrell@alliant.Alliant.COM (Paul Cantrell) Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA Lines: 33 In article <1414@spp2.UUCP> baur@spp2.UUCP (Steven L. Baur) writes: ># ed returns a question mark -- ed cannot handle binary files ># vi returns a "line too long" error message and doesn't read the whole ># jove returns a "line too long" error message also ># Now try your favorite editor and see what happens ... >$ emacs /tmp/emacs ># now in emacs do >(replace-regexp "Emacs" "EMACS") >(save-file) > >And the resulting binary runs. (Tested on SUN-3 and UNIX-PC) >GNU-Emacs, the editor manly enough to edit itself. Don't leave home without >it. Works fine on my Video TECO editor - $ewfred$ creates a perfectly good editor with FRED sprinkled all through it. While this is not an especially useful thing, it does point out a robustness on the part of the editor which IS important sometimes. The thing here is that tools that only work in certain cases are not generally as useful as tools that work in almost all cases. Sure, the author probably didn't intend you to edit binaries with his editor, but if it saves you from writing a special program to do it, great. My wife uses my Video TECO at DEC while all the other people use EDT. Occasionally they go to her to edit a file because it has lines longer than 256 (or was it 128?) and EDT can't hack it. In fact, EDT can't hack much of anything in the way of file formats. So here are these people who just want to get their job done, and can't because some short sighted author thought it didn't make sense to edit lines longer than 256, or that it didn't make sense to edit binary files with an editor. So hurray for GNU-Emacs (and Video TECO too!). PC