Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!ur-valhalla!badri
From: badri@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu (Badri Lokanathan)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Summary: (funny)
Message-ID: <2036@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 89 22:55:28 GMT
References: <222@imspw6.UUCP> <252@torch.UUCP> <2112@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com> <167@isctsse.UUCP> <48@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Reply-To: badri@ee.rochester.edu (Badri Lokanathan)
Organization: UR Dept. of Electrical Engg, Rochester NY 14627
Lines: 56


In article <167@isctsse.UUCP>,
brunjes@isctsse (Roy Brunjes) writes:
>Just one comment to make here:  A Sun techie doing some consulting with me
>pointed out that even Bill Joy (creator of vi) doesn't use Vi anymore.  He
>uses GNU Emacs.

In article <48@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>,
barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:
>
>Bill Joy also said that he regrets making vi modal.
>If he knew more about modeless editors like emacs, he would
>have hacked together a different beast.

I heard about modeless editors like emacs and jove and thought to
myself, man! don't those five vi/ex modes suck! I mean, like command mode
and insert mode and append mode and change and visual mode. What
blasphemy! I'd sell my soul for a modeless editor. Then I heard that
salvation was near in the form of the new testament: Emacs, Jove,
microemacs, GNUemacs.
So I read the jove manual and came across the following:

----------- Cut and pasted from a teachjove session --------------------
The part of the mode line inside the parentheses is to tell you what
modes you are in.  The default mode is Text which is what you are in
now.  It is an example of a "major mode".  There are several major
modes in JOVE for editing different languages and text, such as C
mode, Lisp mode, Text mode, etc.  At any time one and only one major
mode is active, and its two-letter code can always be found in the
mode line just where "Text" is now.  Each major mode makes a few
commands behave differently.  For example, what JOVE considers as part
of a valid expression or an identifier differs from one major mode to
another, since each programming language has a different idea of what
is a legal identifier.
 
Major modes are called major because there are also minor modes. They
are called minor because they aren't alternatives to the major modes,
just minor modifications of them.  Each minor mode can be turned on or
off by itself, regardless of what major mode you are in, and
regardless of the other minor modes.  So you can use no minor modes,
or one minor mode, or any combination of several minor modes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ah, no augmented and diminished modes: Lord have mercy.
Then I tried the suspended 4th mode.

IOT trap: core dumped.
God. What a crock.

Ah well, Bill Joy can drive his BMW or Acura (what does he drive,
anyway?) I still love my rusty old Mazda.
-- 
"I care about my fellow man              {) badri@ee.rochester.edu
 Being taken for a ride,                //\\ {ames,cmcl2,columbia,cornell,
 I care that things start changing     ///\\\ garp,harvard,ll-xn,rutgers}!
 But there's no one on my side."-UB40   _||_   rochester!ur-valhalla!badri