On Wed, 31 Dec 2014 22:44:22 -0600 Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 12/29/14 23:58, Rich Felker wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:18:19AM +1000, David Seikel wrote:
> >> On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:10:07 -0500 dmccunney
> >> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Rich Felker <[email protected]>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>> On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 10:21:26PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> >>>>> I plan to implement vi over the next year, but it's one of the
> >>>>> four realy big commands required by posix (sed, awk, sh, vi)
> >>>>> and I've been debugging sed against real-world data for _weeks_
> >>>>> now. (It's easy to knock out a simple 90% implementation. It's
> >>>>> really hard to make something do everything right in all the
> >>>>> cases people are going to throw at it.)
> >>>>
> >>>> It would be awesome to have mg too or a similar mg-like emacs
> >>>> clone but with working unicode support.
> >>
> >> Mg is one I haven't heard of.  Got a URL?
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_%28editor%29
> > http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/
> > 
> > It's the only "emacs clone" I've ever seen that actually feels like
> > real emacs (except the lack of slowness) for real editing tasks. The
> > rest only look like emacs superficially, although jmacs (from joe)
> > and qemacs (Fabrice Bellard) are somewhat close but still feel like
> > semi-emacs-like bindings on a foreign editor.
> 
> I'm not a native user of emacs. (I did wordstar bindings from Turbo C
> through qedit until the Sun Workstations at Rutgers kept getting
> really confused by ctrl-s even though joe claimed it was putting the
> terminal in raw mode when it didn't segfault. Then I switched to vi in
> self-defense, but  have never actually recommended it.)
> 
> A very, very long time ago I used microemacs on the Amiga for about 6
> months, but haven't poked at it since. When we get around to terminal
> stuff I'd like somebody comfortable with emacs to tell me how the
> keybindings/behavior are wrong, I can't dogfood that.

I've been programming computers since the mid '70s, programming every
class of computing device except supercomputers (though I did work for
the company that turned bunches of PS3's into supercomputers).  During
the first couple of decades of that, I would often end up using what
ever random editors were available on what ever random computer systems
I had to work on that day.  Often several in a single day.  I've used
OMR cards (punch cards with black marks instead of holes), Martian
hieroglyph editors (APL was my first language), front panel switches,
line editors, hex editors (even on machines that only had a hex
keypad), screen editors, terminal based IDE's, and full blown GUI
IDE's.  I've even used beads, matchboxes, and glue to program a
computer.  I came very close to using a magnetised pin once for
editing, but never used butterflies.  I've used slide rules and
abacuses.

I've _been_ a text editor.  For my first real job, on a mining site
(only one computer within hundreds of kilometres, I built it from
discrete components and sheet metal), one of the bosses would sit in his
room with source code printouts.  He would scribble line editor
commands all over these printouts, then hand them to me.  Late at night
when the computer was not being used by the office staff, I'd sit in
front of it and enter his editor commands.  Was very educational for a
young coder.  The client later bought Wordstar for the secretaries, a
big step up.

I have a simple test to decide if I like an editor as a result of these
decades of random editor usage.  If I can't sit down with the editor
and figure out how to do basic editing and saving in less than a
minute (sans documentation), then in my opinion it's a crap editor.
Both TECO and vi fail this test miserably, though oddly enough I have a
soft spot for TECO.

I have memorised one command to deal with vi, since it does tend to be
the default editor in unix style systems, thus I accidentally end up
inside it sometimes without asking for it -

killall -KILL vi

OK, yes I know about :qa as well, killall is much more satisfying.  B-)

Out of all the editors that I have implemented in boxes, I have used
them all professionally, including the line editors buried inside emacs
and vi.  These days I prefer to use mc and mcedit for everything though,
which is why boxes includes mcedit.  So I'll dogfood mcedit, the rest
I'll have to rely on others to tell me what I get wrong.

A traditional trick to try with TECO is to type in your name, to see
what it does.  The first two letters of my name delete the rest of the
file, so mine is kinda boring.  I have no plans to implement TECO in
boxes, vi and ed are already there.

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.

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