Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Emacs and vi are *horrible* designs. What's your point?
They both seem to have endured for many years while being constantly improved and changed. That would indicate good design. They are also both immensely popular with programmers.
This horrible design is part of what caused the great emacs/xemacs schism originally.
From my reading of the history it was competing egos that caused it.
Emacs is in desperate need of a refactor. However, someone would have to sit down and write unit tests for different modules before they could do that. And nobody in the open source world is going to do that.
This may be true but that is not necessarily because the design was bad. I think pretty much anything would be in need of a refactor after 20 or 30 years.
Maybe vim doesn't have the same problems. I'll let someone who has actually used and looked at vim code comment.
I wasn't really referring to the text editors themselves when I asked if this stuff was badly designed. I was more referring to the widget system and our other software like web browsers and email programs that will not simply let you embed an xterm like widget with a text app such as emacs or vi running inside of it. Emacs and vi themselves shouldn't even have to know that they are running inside such an app and should not need any code changes to implement what I have in mind.
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