Re: [TCLUG:19757] Editors, keybindings, color, etc. (was: Emacs HTMLmode)

[Luke Francl <fran0382@tc.umn.edu>]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Mike Hicks wrote:

[snip]

> I want this:  An editor that can understand all of my nice keys that I
> used to use when I ran DOS -- arrows, delete, insert, home, and end
> should all work in a nice and/or easily re-configurable manner
> (personally, I prefer home and end to go to the beginning and end of a
> line on the screen, rather than the beginning and end of a document, or
> the beginning and end of a line that wraps around the screen). 
> Selecting text using shift-arrow was nice.  Fortunately, Linux seems to
> understand shift-insert for paste (though it locks up Netscape..).  

Vim has a nice interface for this which I just learned about: hit "v" to
enter "visual mode" then move your selection around with the arrow or
movement keys. It selects blocks of text. "V" does whole lines and
"^V" does text veritcally!

> I also (need)/(really, really want) to have colorized text.  I know this
> is a feature on many editors, but it's never easy to find.  

Does anyone know how to turn this on in plain Emacs? I know it's possible,
but I don't know how!

Again, Vim does pretty nice colorized text, but it only seems to work well
in the console and in rxvt -- everything else looks awful, and since at
work I can't use either of those, I can't use syntax coloring.

I also wish Vim was smarter about indents, like Emacs.

I'd rather
> have it default to displaying in color if the terminal can handle it. 
> (I also think that all Linux distributions should default to using `ls
> --color=auto -F' but I must just be weird..)  Also, I want the editor to

Slackware does :)

> be a bit smarter about line wrapping.  Files that end in .c, .html, and
> other well-known source file formats should automatically disable line
> wrapping.

vi never wraps lines, which is annoying for writing long things (which is
why I'm writing in Emacs right now). Emacs has good support for most file
formats, thankfully. Though I am not getting tab support in HTML mode like
in C mode. Does this feature exist, or is all Emacs-HTML unindented?

> After using Linux for a while, I think the PC DOS 7.0 edit command was
> probably one of the best editors I've seen.  I'm not sure if it had
> color highlighting, but it had a nice command line interface
> (unfortunately, I never figured it out until far too late).  To do a
> global search-and-replace in your document, hit [ESC] (to get to the
> command line), then type `s/original/replacement/g'.  Anyone who has
> used sed or perl knows this syntax.  

You mean, like vi? 
:s/original/replacement/g 

It certainly wasn't the perfect
> editor (I seem to recall being forced to page through large amounts of
> documentation just to figure out how to save anything), but something to
> consider as a model.

I've heard that Nedit is a really nice editor, but I've never used it. You
might want to try that.

Still trying to find the perfect editor,
Luke