: > I have made available a new version of the mined text editor on : > http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~wolff/mined98.tar.gz I apologize for my double mistake with this announcement. The link quoted above is now correct and accessible. I would appreciate any feedback, especially on the question, how useful the simple right-to-left / bidi support really is and how it might be improved. Other new Unicode features are * improved editing support for combined characters and * optional handling of Unicode line ends I have not yet updated documentation; please consult the file CHANGES which is also included below. Kind regards, Thomas Wolff [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~wolff/mined-utf.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Features: --------- Scrollbar display May be used for relative or absolute positioning with the three mouse buttons. Flexible and simultaneous handling of different line ends Unix and MSDOS line ends can be handled in the same editing session and are indicated by different coloured line-end symbols. Files without trailing line-end can be edited and created. Transparent long line handling Overly long lines are now read in transparently. They are attached a "NONE" line-end type so they will be written out exactly as they came in. Splitting within UTF-8 sequences is avoided; splitting of combined characters is not avoided, however, they will join seemlessly as lines are joined again. (Combining characters at the beginning of a line are not displayed in combined display mode.) Special line-end handling details and binary transparency With the above two modifications, a couple of line end handling features were introduced and binary transparency was achieved. * Input of NUL characters from file is accepted and is presented as a special "NUL" line-end type. Explicitly entering a NUL character works, too (either literally or with ^V # 0). Thus mined achieves binary transparency through an editing cycle now. * The ^O command in a line with "NUL" or "NONE" line-end will reproduce this line-end type in contrast to entering a new-line which will always produce a real line-end. * In order to split a line in two, separated with "NONE" line-end, use HOP ^O (e.g. ^G^O). Tags file support Moving to the definition of an identifier using the tags file (generated by the ctags command) was added. If a new file is opened for this purpose, the current file is saved automatically. * Command: ESC t when cursor is on identifier (with HOP, it prompts for the identifier), or from Search or Popup menu. File handling consistency improved The command ESC # to edit the nth file from the command line was extended with ESC # # which just reloads the current file. Remembering editing information between sessions In addition to the current position, also the paragraph justification margins (wrap-around margins) are remembered until the next invocation, but only if justification mode is switched on. Unicode handling features: -------------------------- Combined character display Handling of Unicode combined character display is enabled by default with UTF-8 terminal operation. (May be disabled by environment variable utf8_no_combining_screen, or command line option -c.) * There are two editing modes for combined characters: combined and separated. Switch modes by clicking on the "c/C" indicator next to the UTF-8 "L/U" indicator in the flags area of the top line, or in the eXtra menu. * In combined display mode, the following special functions are available: The cursor can be moved into a combined character with ctrl-left-arrow or ctrl-right-arrow, provided these cursor keys are configured to emit distinguished escape sequences with control-key held. ^V-left-arrow and ^V-right-arrow also work. You can determine the exact position of the cursor if permanent character info is switched on (by HOP ESC u or with HOP in the eXtra menu). * Partially editing combined characters: * If the cursor is on a combined character, delete next character will delete the whole combined character, with all combining accents. * If the cursor is within a combined character, delete next character will delete the current combining accent only. * In separated display mode, all cursor and text modification operations work on the combining parts as displayed. Search expressions The restriction that search ranges could not be used for non-ASCII characters in UTF mode was removed. * Search ranges can, however, not be very large as all included characters are listed in an internal buffer which is limited to ca. 1 KB. Case toggle The case switch function (e.g. in the eXtra menu) works also with all Unicode characters. Unicode line ends Line separator and paragraph separator are optionally detected and handled. * Activate this mode by two -u options ("-u -u" on command line or "uu" in MINED environment variable). * Inserting a new line on a line with Unicode lineend will insert a line separator unless the hop flag is active in which case a paragraph separator will be used. Basic input support for right-to-left scripts After entering a right-to-left character, the cursor position is moved left of it, so subsequent characters will be appended left and the text shifted right. Entering left-to-right characters will obviously automatically switch direction; to continue with right-to-left, the cursor must be moved manually (e.g. to the line beginning). * Newline, Space, TAB, and combining characters attempt to behave well according to what was entered before; however, intermediate cursor movement is not considered. * Activate right-to-left support with the command line option -b. * This mode is not meant to work with the latest right-to-left xterm patch - it would rather interfere with it. The mined right-to-left mode is just intended to provide a simple mechanism to quickly enter visually correct right-to-left text in a conventional environment. * Orientation of text alignment remains on the left side in this mode. Suggestions for improvement in order to make it useful for right-to-left or bidirectional writing are welcome. Interface: ---------- Menu display Uses block graphics characters if determined to be available. Menu layout The pulldown and popup menus are in variable width now (depending on contents). Mouse usage Was enabled with curses operation (useful for EMX, see below). Keyboard availability of menus Menus are available from the keyboard; Alt-letter (or ESC-letter) pulls down a menu starting with that letter, Alt-TAB pulls down the file menu, Alt-blank pops up the quick menu. (In order to make Alt work as a modifier, set the xterm resource metaSendsEscape to true as suggested in the example file .Xdefaults.mined.) Line begin/end keys, hop key assignment In order to get rid of the waste of keyboard assignments which is imposed by terminal emulation emitting the same escape sequences for keys of the two keypad areas, some X resource definitions were included in the file .Xdefaults.mined as a recommendation (section XTerm*VT100.Translations). Also the hop key may have to be made available explicitly with some X setups (also included in that file). Keyboard reassignments In order to make room for the Alt-keys to address menus, some commands had to be reassigned: substitute: ESC , (was: ESC s) set marker n: ESC m (was: ESC ,) screen smaller: ESC % (was: ESC m) screen bigger: ESC & (was: ESC M) case toggle: ESC C (was: ESC f) edit other file: use F3, or "Open" from the File menu (was: ESC e) print buffer: use "print buffer" from the File menu (was: ESC p) Operation in system environment: -------------------------------- Window resize propagated to parent shell If the window is resized, the SIGWINCH signal is propagated to the parent process so that e.g. the shell also knows about the changed size. Porting: -------- Windows ports Adaptations to enable compilation in Cygwin and EMX environments. Works in EMX with ncurses and mouse enabled. Windows port with mouse / DOS port? A lot of changes to the curses adaptation enabled seemless operation in the EMX environment under Windows. Unfortunately, EMX does not keep its promise to generate dual-mode Windows and DOS executables. Can anyone help? Bug fixes: ---------- Word-wrap Paragraph justification moved to the wrong position if triggered by a space entered at the end of line. Chinese mode display In 8/16 bit character set mode, some situations (illegal 16-bit codes) of display garbage were fixed. Various minor bugs ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
