Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!uva!borton
From: borton@uva.UUCP (Chris Borton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: CAPPS' (was:Text editor help)
Message-ID: <549@uva.UUCP>
Date: 10 Oct 88 17:04:37 GMT
References: <2476@rti.UUCP> <2580001@hpausla.HP.COM>
Reply-To: borton@uva.UUCP (Chris Borton)
Organization: Faculteit Wiskunde & Informatica, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Lines: 65

In article <2580001@hpausla.HP.COM> jcl@hpausla.HP.COM (Jeff Laing) writes:
>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!!!

I'd like to take this opportunity to espouse the (in my opinions) extremely
high quality and value of CAPPS' for LSC.  The interesting thing to note here
is that you can now easily program your wishes--SigmaEdit is a poor ripoff
(with near-0 reworking) of the Apple-Edit DA Sample that comes with CAPPS'.

For those who are wondering: CAPPS' is a library of routines modelled exactly
after TEdit that support tabs.  Simply put: it's the text editing routines
from LightspeedC.  No word wrap and it's incredibly fast.  No 32K limit; only
limit is memory.  Comes with library for PEdit routines, GREP searching and
multi-directory searching.  PEdit includes commands like scroll to line x in
addition to all the TEdit equivalents.

What is really super, I think, are the two samples that come with it.  One is
PEdit, a C-pretty printer, and the other is Apple-Edit, a DA.  These samples
are extremely well-organized and written (I might have a few small
differences of opinion a few places, but trivial), fully commented and
provide a wonderful base for most Mac applications.  This is what I used to
develop my shell.

For applications needing program-style text editing, which is a surprising
majority in my experience, this library is what I need.  It works great!

>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

MacTutor did have an article doing this a year or two back, but a friend of
mine claimed it was problematical.  Don't know myself.  I use CAPPS' instead
and am very happy.  TEdit is NOT designed for real text editing (see Tech
Note 203); it does a full shift of ALL char's on every char insert.  ==>bad
performance.  PEdit and other systems designed for big text editing use a gap
near the insertion point to provide room to shift into.

>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???

Since this implementation was approved by Apple Tech, it is a standard in my
opinion.  Just needs to be distributed widely...

Aside: since I like Apple-Edit so much, and friends of mine like Sigma-Edit a
	lot, I've decided to embark upon a furthering of that idea and flesh
	it out with some features such as real printing, etc.  Feel free to
	mail me ideas; the first version will read WriteNow and MacWrite
	formats as well (already have that done...).  

Note: believe it or not, I have no connection with THINK.  I just feel that
	CAPPS' is a tremendous product that could improve a lot of things and
	that has not gotten enough exposure.

-cbb
-- 
Chris Borton	borton%uva@mcvax.{nl,bitnet,uucp} 
Rotary Scholar, University of Amsterdam CS