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From: dieter@jupiter.nmt.edu (The Demented Teddy Bear)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.editors
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <2142@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Date: 11 Mar 89 23:38:22 GMT
References: <222@imspw6.UUCP> <252@torch.UUCP> <9837@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Sender: dieter@nmtsun.nmt.edu
Reply-To: dieter@jupiter.nmt.edu (The Demented Teddy Bear)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: New Mexico Tech
Lines: 32
In-reply-to: bogstad@smoke.BRL.MIL (William Bogstad )

In article <9837@smoke.BRL.MIL>, bogstad@smoke (William Bogstad ) writes:
> 	Just out of curiosity ,but what particular feature or non-feature
> of vi makes it not a WYSIWYG editor?  With vi you get exactly what you
> see on your screen no more and no less.

Well, one of my favorite examples is editing executables (yes, I know
this is evil and vile, but when you don't have source and a hard-wired
string is completely wrong....)  You can do this under GNU (and
probably other) Emacs.  Vi complains about non-ASCII characters and
truncated lines, and when you write the resulting file out, you get an
exec error (bad format, I believe).  Also, the screen display is
missing the top few lines (why, I don't know, but it's consistent
behaviour).  This, BTW, is on a Sun 3 running SunOS 3.5.  I've used
Emacs to edit binaries on several flavors of Unix, so it isn't
specific to Sun.

The other major lack is windowing.  Being able to actually see multiple
files (or non-adjacent parts of the same file) is incredibly helpful.

Overall, though, Emacs is not a WYSIWIG editor.  That usually implies
that you see italics, bold face, and what not exactly as it will appear
in the resulting print-out.  For (hopefully) obvious reasons, this isn't
practical in the Unix world.  Sure, you may have a bit-mapped display
on your desk, but the five blokes down the hall rlogin'd from their
VT-100s don't have quite the same resolution.  But, being able to see
everything in the file helps.

Dieter
-- 
Welcome to the island.  You are number six.
dieter%nmt@relay.cs.net
dieter@jupiter.nmt.edu