On day25/2/01 at 6:42 pm +0000, Alan Fry wrote:
>There are moves afoot to try to improve MacPerl's built-in editor;
>it seems to be the consensus view that it would be "nice if it could
>be improved a bit".
If you are intending to make improvements to the existing TextEdit
32K editor rather than changing the engine to WASTE, then certainly,
as someone else has said, wider tabs or a preference to set the tab
width.
Since the editor, for all its outdatedness, is scriptable, then the
addition of a modern hierarchical Scripts menu would be, in my
opinion, the greatest addition that could be made, since this would
enable such things as block-commenting etc. to be done by AE without
changing a thing in the editor itself. Sure, you can use OSA Menu,
but that's a very temperamental toy in my long experience of it and I
now never install it.
For AppleScript scripting, I still use the outdated Script Editor in
preference to Smile (WASTE based) but all regular tasks are automated
with OneClick, otherwise it would be tiresome since SE is not
scriptable. Since MacPerl has a pretty good, if imperfect, aete most
of which nobody ever uses owing to the lack of a convenient interface
(menu or buttons), it is crying out for a Scripts menu.
In contrast to AppleScript, where it is never necessary for a
sensible scripter to exceed 32K, MacPerl's usefulness would be
greatly enhanced by the WASTE engine -- not that scripts need to
exceed 32K but because large files could then be opened in MacPerl.
That's my twopenn'orth
JD
