begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 12:27:56AM -0800: [snip] > And I've always wondered: WHY are our web browsers saddled with such > lame text editors? If real hackers invented the web browser and real
There's one bogus assumption: "real hackers" weren't driving the design or implementation... The web's killer app was pr0n, after all, and how much of an editor do you need for _that_? > hackers code on mozilla and we enter so much data in webforms these days > why on earth are we still stuck with the stupid built in editor? Why Because most of the folks these days didn't want to attempt the learning curve for vi and/or emacs, and looked for "easier" solutions... so there's no need. Only a few folks are wishing for these sorts of features. > can't they embed vi or emacs or whatever editor pertains to your > particular religion into a textarea widget? And I get REALLY steamed I suspect that's partially the problem of the editors. What is *needed* is a curses module for text area, as that's pretty much what's needed to integrate in the editors you and I want. Of course, this isn't restricted to just the Web. Smalltalk provides an extremely crappy editor -- and defenders claim that because you can do so much in Smalltalk with so little code, you don't *need* a powerful editor; the environment is powerful, and all a good editor would do would be to encourage you to type more. I would like handles on text-areas so that I can resize 'em (and then have the browser remember that for *this* url, I like the text areas resized like _so_). I would like a vi-like (and, presumably, a microemacs-like) capability -- I don't need the *full* feature-set. At a minimum, I'd want insert (iIaAoO) and command mode, hjkl^F^B movement, / and ? searching, :s/string1/string2/[g] substitution, toggle-able word-wrap, and [#]y[yw] and pP. > when I have written a large volume of text into a text area and > something happens and I lose it! With vi or emacs or some decent editor > this wouldn't happen. Well, it _might_ happen. Most vi implemenations that I've worked with in the M$ world didn't have graceful recovery of works-in-progress. > Yes, I know there are external editor extensions > but they just aren't the same and you always have to invoke some special > incantation to get the external editor, it doesn't automatically appear > in the webpage. Curses support, I tell you, is the key. -Stewart "Foiled again!" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
