Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request
From: tom@icase.edu (Tom Crockett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: Looking for another Editor
Keywords: Software
Message-ID: <EY9vSkz0-cs2Edz0Ji@icase>
Date: 18 Apr 89 19:38:42 GMT
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 28
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
Original-Date: Wed, 22 Mar 89 10:11:44 -0500 (EST)
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 230, message 5 of 16

>  Unfortunately, textedit does a poor job as an editor.  Macros, global
>  search and replace?  Forget it.  Regular expressions, case-insensitive
>  finds?  Only a memory.

I'm a long-term vi user who switched to emacs a few months ago, but was
not entirely happy with it.  In the last couple of months I've discovered
the Andrew system's "ez" editor.  It's a window- and mouse-based editor
which also retains much of the flavor of emacs, and thus provides the
capabilities listed above as missing from textview.  I've found that
cursor positioning and cutting and pasting with the mouse are really easy,
but for those who prefer leaving their hands on the keyboard, there are
emacs-style keystrokes as well which will do virtually everything.  It's
not perfect, but the more I use it the better I like it.  It's not nearly
as clumsy as emacs, and is probably easier to use than vi.  Of course,
there are some things that vi and emacs can do better.  By default ez uses
a variable-width character font, so it's hard to line things up in nice
neat columns for subsequent printing, but it's possible to override the
defaults.

Of course, you have to be running Andrew on top of X to use ez -- it won't
buy you anything from suntools.

Tom Crockett

Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering
M.S. 132C                               e-mail:  tom@icase.edu
NASA Langley Research Center            phone:  (804) 864-2182
Hampton,  VA  23665