Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!mcnc!ecsvax!dukeac!bet
From: bet@dukeac.UUCP (Bennett Todd)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Another vi feature I miss.
Message-ID: <1291@dukeac.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 89 22:08:27 GMT
References: <7494@killer.Dallas.TX.US>
Reply-To: bet@dukeac.UUCP (Bennett Todd)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Radiology, Duke Med. Center, Durham, NC
Lines: 32

In article <7494@killer.Dallas.TX.US> cantrell@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Keith Cantrell) writes:
>A vi feature I miss is the way vi keep track of where the cursor is
>as you move up and down lines.  In vi if I am on column 30 and move
>to a line that only has 10 character on it, the cursor goes to the
>end of the line, but when I get to a line that has more than 30
>characters on it, the cursor will go back to column 30.  Emacs
>on the other hand will either, stay at column 10 and eventually
>go to the beginning of the line when I hit on empty line and stay
>there, or I can set some variable to make it track the end of the line,
>but that's not what I want.  Has anybody every hacked the
>sources to change this?

It would really bother me if emacs behaved as you describe; happily, none of
the EMACS style editors I keep handy act that way. All I have are GNU EMACS
Version 18.52, JOVE Version 4.9, and ELLE Version 4.1b; I didn't bother to
keep executables of any of the other varients around as I don't seem to need
them. (In case folks are curious, the reasons I keep the versions around are:
GNU EMACS of course does everything; JOVE is extremely nice and doesn't take
nearly so long to fire up; ELLE can edit files much, much, much larger than
virtual memory.) Perhaps if you mentioned what version of EMACS you are using
(perpetual gripe about postings to this danged group). To be precise, every
EMACS style editor I tried followed the extreme end of line for all lines
shorter than the current column as I moved the cursor up and down lines,
always recovering the original column as I came to any line long enough.

-Bennett
bet@orion.mc.duke.edu

P.S. Maybe we should moderate this group, with a posting requirement (enforced
by the reflector at the moderator's address) that no message may be posted
without a header field 'Emacs-Version: ' describing what version of EMACS it
referred to?:-)