On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Mike Hicks wrote:

> Heh, I thought I'd be summarily flamed..

Editors tend to cause that :)

> That's neat.  While I don't particularly go for the use of `v' (like I
> said, I'd rather use shift for selecting text), I like the fact that
> there are several different modes.

I agree, using shift is nice, and something I always used in the
Mac/Windows world...

> Getting back to the home, end, delete, insert keys, I realized a while
> after I started using Linux that I was not able to use those keys in
> most situations, and it got really annoying.  Now, after using pico for
> so long, I don't use home and end much anymore.  To get to the end of a
> line, I go down a line, get to the beginning of that line, and do one
> more left-arrow keystroke to get to the end of the previous line.  It
> really annoys me that this doesn't work in vi, as the arrow keys won't
> wrap around to the next/previous line when you reach the beginning or
> end.

You might want to try ctrl-e to get to the end of a line, and ctrl-a to
get to the end. Works in Pico and Emacs. In vi, ^ is beginning and $ is
end. 

> I found the option once or twice (by going through the menus), but I
> never figured out how to save that configuration.  However, once it was
> enabled, it also caused anything you printed to be in color as well. 
> Not such a good thing if you only have a B&W laser printer, or if your
> colors don't display well on white (such as yellow..)

I should look harder/buy a book on Emacs. I don't have a printer, so that
shouldn't be a problem. Besides, isn't that what lpr is for? ;)

> I'm probably crazy to ask about this, as I don't know if it's a feature
> I'd like at all, but is there an editor out there that can do automatic
> `style'?  I only ask because there are different projects out there that
> like to format things in different ways.  Some want you to declare
> functions like
> 
>   int myfunc1() {
>     printf("Hello.\n");
>     return 0;
>   }
> 
> While others (like GTK/Gnome) want formatting to look more like
> 
>   char *
>   myfunc2 (char *str)
>   {
>     printf ("Hello\n");
>     return str;
>   }
> 
> It would be nice if you could just flip a switch somewhere and change
> formatting, either of a source file you already have, or something that
> will automatically re-arrange things as you type them in.  However, this
> kind of scares me -- I know how Word and other programs do similar
> things which end up just confusing people.  Definitely not an option
> that I'd turn on by default..

Emacs supports both of those styles, but it won't change it as far as I
know (though there's probably some elisp script someplace that would). I
believe there are Perl pretty printers which do this.

> Yeah, there should be some sort of save mode that acts like Netscape's
> plaintext message composer.  After you finish the message, all of the
> lines get wrapped around at a certain number of characters.  Any lines
> that start with `>' or other characters used for quoting should not be
> wrapped.  I actually really like Netscape's composer as an editor.  I
> guess the Motif text widget must be really good.  I don't particularly
> like the text editing widget in Gtk, as it doesn't let the home and end
> keys work in a way that I like (well, maybe there's an option
> somewhere...).  If a line wraps around, the home and end keys can take
> you to the beginning or end of an entire paragraph.  Yucky..

Well, that is technically a feature, since that really is only one
line. In emacs you can go forward one word at a time with cntrl-arrow, and
in vi, you can use e to move forward one word...

> > You mean, like vi?
> > :s/original/replacement/g
> 
> Oops..  yeah.  vi is very close in many ways to what I'd really like in
> an editor, though I've pointed out some of the things I don't like.  I
> personally wish that there was a good menuing system that would allow
> new users to quickly and easily learn how to use it.  The menus in gvim,
> for example, have been only marginally helpful in showing me what
> keystrokes to use.

Yeah, I haven't been too impressed with graphical vi clones. They're kind
of pointless. It might be nice if every option was represnted in the
menus...then they'd be at least useful.

> Heh, well it doesn't help that many editors that are in common use today
> on Linux and Unix were first created for use on very slow terminals. 
> There are some editors for DOS, in comparison, that were very good
> because they didn't have to deal with the limitations of running over
> slow links -- they could just access the video card directly.

Good point. That's  probably why I like to come into X when I write
something long.


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