Hello, Brian Tiffin here, GNU maintainer for GnuCOBOL. Old Forther, polyFORTH/32 Vax/VMS in particular.
Spent years in the system, got used to block editing. Took a while, but being in Forth headspace, for all tasks, including edits, is a powerful productivity boost. I noticed Gforth is moving in that direction, with the addition of locate, and l/n/b, which is good in my old guy opinion. But... I'd also like to make a suggestion. Drop after-l. Don't wait for the next key stroke to decide what state to put the console in. It becomes a mental mode breaking point, with a distracting screen paint out of order. After the an l, n, b waiting to see if the programmer wants to tap cursor keys up and down to move the source listing around, should not be the default. An l/n/b/locate should just go back to the console mode, not after-l mode. Type b<ret> for back and n<ret> for forward source listings. All after-l does is break an immersion, again, in my opinion. One of the benefits of blocks (or something similar) when in the console is that you can ponder Forth at the keyboard. You can't really ponder Forth in an external editor. You gotta switch brain zone. So using blocks is like having a scratchpad / chalkboard accessible while in Forth brain mode. Pondering the next few words, and stack gymnastics required is easier in the Forth console, just try it and see. In an external editor that isn't at hand. Gotta swap the entire mind set. Try it in Gforth, back to editor mind set and type it in a text file, then back to tweak try some other things in Gforth. As for now, can only opine that Gforth, while moving closer to immersion with the locate and source view tools, is letting after-l put a huge hurdle in the quest at attaining the "zone" of immersive Forth. Personally, I'd drop right to console mode, (where up/down arrow is history recall, not a new mental mode of scrolling text) and let programmers two-type the b<ret> and n<ret>. The flash from source view to normal console with the stack status blue bar, is distracting. Just a suggestion. Probably a thing that will sink into muscle memory, but for now exploring Gforth (which is splendid) is riddled with up/down arrow mental speed bumps, and a two mode console that is not quite the right kind of modal, and a screen flash that triggers something akin to jump scares. :-) Thanks for Gforth 0.7.9. by the way. Awesome. Have good, make well, Blue
