Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-sde!hpcea!hpausla!jcl
From: jcl@hpausla.HP.COM (Jeff Laing)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Text editor help
Message-ID: <2580001@hpausla.HP.COM>
Date: 3 Oct 88 03:43:41 GMT
References: <2476@rti.UUCP>
Organization: HP Australian Software Operation
Lines: 36

>Everyone agrees that TextEdit should handle tabs, except Apple. Unfortunately,
>theirs is the only opinion that counts.

Hmmm. Now thats an interesting issue, isnt it?  Just exactly what would 
happen if the MacProgrammer community started acting like the unix equivalents?

What would happen if, instead of creating neat little hacks like QuickFolder,
someone actually sat down and wrote a P.D (or shareware or whatever) version
of PACK-3 that had the new functionallity in it?  Can it be that hard?

I know several people who have replaced CDEF-1 with the neato double-ended
scroll bar version and are completely happy with it... could this work with
other stuff?  Yeh, it means your code might become System specific; isn't it
heading that way already?

I have just sent off for a copy of Capps' for LSC because I needed the facility
of text editing in my program; what I would have liked instead is to have had
SigmaEdit (the best of the D/A editors I've seen so far) respond to Control
messages that instructed it to 'open specified file, scroll to specified line'
from any application.  That way I only have the one copy of the edit routines
even if I develop multiple programs.   What would have been best of all would
be a TextEdit that automatically stuck scroll bars in the rectangle for me and
handled all that stuff inside TEClick!!!

Oops, starting to wander.  Anyway, my point.  Could some enterprising person
out there have written the tab handling TextEdit and installed it over the old
one? (I accept that they are going to trail behind on things like style, fonts,
etc but thats another issue)  I don't mind having to install it in my system

The same argument could be applied to things like MDEF-0 (tearoff windows tend
to require changes to the MDEF to allow the draggable image).  MacTutor has
published source which shows how .. why not make it a standard NOW???

Jeff Laing    <jcl@hpausla>
Hewlett Packard Australian Software Operation
"Opinions? Me?   I own a Macintosh!  I got religion, not opinion "