Chuckie wrote:
> At the End of Days, we will be Judged, not by our actions or who we are,
>but by the sophistication of our respective PROFILEs. I am ready. Are
>you?
I sure am -- I bet my PROFILE XEDIT does more than yours, neener neener!
Seriously, it does do some things that reflect 30 years of usage. First, it
sets ALL the settings I prefer, even if they're the defaults -- that way if I'm
in a file and tinker, I can just type "PROFILE" to get back to "my" environment
(yes, of course I know about PRESERVE/RESTORE, but they don't do everything,
and you have to remember to do the PRESERVE). Perhaps more significantly, it
also means that if I'm on another ID, I can LINK and ACCESS my disk, EXECLOAD
PROFILE XEDIT fm PHILS XEDIT, then simply issue PHILS to get "my" environment.
And my XEDIT screen doesn't look the same as yours. Besides lots of XEDIT
settings, I use an NLS override to set the top line of the display to include
additional information, e.g.:
PROFILE EXEC A1 V 255 w=255 t=255 c=1 Line=35/55 ?=TOP a=0
Those are:
w=width
t=trunk
c=column
Line=n/m ("line n of m in the entire file")
?=last command
a=alt
and the bottom right of my screen includes the userid:
(phsiii) 3 files
...instead of wasting the real estate on "X E D I T". That's real nice with
multiple sessions.
If I set a RANGE, the TOR (Top-of-Range) and EOR (End-of-Range) lines include
their counterpart information:
* * * Top of Range (Line=&TOR (end of range=&EOR)) * * *
* * * End of Range (Line=&EOR (top of range=&TOR)) * * *
These are very useful changes, if a bit subtle -- folks often kind of scowl at
my XEDIT for a while before finally figuring out what's different.
I do a bunch of processing before even doing an (explicit!) LOAD subcommand: I
have a utility that resolves partial fileids, so I can type "x p x" and get my
PROFILE XEDIT (with a preferred list of filetypes to resolve to). I also have a
CMS MODULE that gets at XEDIT control blocks before the LOAD and forces MSGLINE
ON 2 n OVERLAY (this keeps UPDATE messages from being written in line mode,
which is just fugly).
Anyway, continuing the religious thread: for my money, XEDIT is by far the most
powerful editor I've ever seen. emacs is probably as powerful in its own way,
but it's pretty user-hostile to the newbie; and every other editor is missing
many of XEDIT's useful features. (OK, KEDIT is in some ways better than XEDIT,
but the lack of UPDATE support weakens it.) The only major feature XEDIT lacks
is UNDO. I could imagine, in this era of large virtual storage, an UNDO
addition that would just store changes in memory -- but I suppose XEDIT
development is dead, alas.
...phsiii
