On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Marc André Tanner <m...@brain-dump.org> wrote: >> I plan to implement vi over the next year > > I agree that there is a need for a clean vi(m) like editor. Based on my > experience I got from writing my own work in progress clone[0], the > problem is that while the basic editing functionality is fairly easy to > provide, users will also expect more advance stuff like (visual block mode, > code folding, auto completion etc). If you don't implement these then > they won't use it as their main editor, at which point the whole endeavor > becomes kind of pointless ...
Hardly pointless. I first learned *nix in the 80's, beginning with AT&T System V Release 2, when Linux was not yet a gleam in Linus Torvald's eye. I learned vi because it was the standard editor offered with Unix systems, and while other things like emacs were around, vi was pretty much guaranteed to be on the machine you had to work on. I came to Unix from an IBM mainframe environment, and vi was a rude shock after screen editing on a 3270 block mode terminal with IBM SPF, but once I understood the design concepts I grew to like it. These days I use Linux, and Linux tends to come with Vim. I have Vim under Linux and Windows, but for the use I make of it, it might as well *be* original vi. I've never had a need to use the myriad of features Vim added to the original design. Toybox needs a decent basic editor, and one modeled after vi is a reasonable design choice. If it can also emulate others like emacs, and it's essentially a matter of mapping different keystrokes to underlying editor functions, and so much the better. On a Toybox based system, I'd likely use its editor by default, but I wouldn't be concerned with things like syntax highlighting, code folding, and auto-completion, unless those could be implemented on top of the existing framework with a minimum of code and trouble. If I really need an editor that does all the fancy stuff, I'll install one. Lord knows there are enough to choose from. Even when I have more powerful editors available, I've often used vi from a command line for editing because most of the editing I need to do is quick-and-dirty - create a script, edit a config file - and a full featured programmer's development editor with all bells and whistles is massive overkill. Speed trumps function, and I can invoke vi or the like, do my edits, save my changes and exit far faster than I can in a major editor. Assuming that an editor that might not be used as the main editor is pointless to implement is a misguided notion. The editor needs to be good enough to handle the basic chores and give the users something to use until they can install whatever they normally prefer if they want more than it offers. It shouldn't *try* to compete with what the user might otherwise use except by accident. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list Toybox@lists.landley.net http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net
