On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, wren argetlahm wrote:
And, I mean I could use vim, it has pretty good highlighting abilities, but it'd be nice to get something good and Mac-ish.
Maybe I should have clarified that Emacs and Vim came, unbidden, to mind, because both of them already have nice GUI Mac versions.
I happen to prefer Vim, and use that as my main editor in most cases, but a case could be made that Emacs is already pretty "Mac-ish", in that a lot of Cocoa applications support Emacs keybindings to begin with. Try it out in, say, a text box in Safari: ^a jumps to the start of a line, ^e jumps to the end, ^d deletes the character to the right, ^h deletes the character to the left, etc. As I understand it, anything written using the Cocoa libraries gets this for free, and it will be immediately familiar to anyone that knows Emacs (or readline, bash, pine, etc).
Plus, if you come up with useful extensions to these editors, they will be useful to people on other operating systems, so you automatically get a larger pool of people who can take your ideas, run with them, and send any improvements they can come up with back to you.
As for whether Vim or Emacs can handle different regions of a file in different ways, I've never looked for that feature, but there may be discussion of it in the vim-users list, or [insert Emacs equivalent mailing list here], or other documentation for those editors. If the functionality doesn't exist, I'm sure it's something that would be useful to lots of people...
-- Chris Devers
