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Editors, keybindings, color, etc. (was: Emacs HTML mode)



For some reason, this got me going..

But before I get too far, I think RedHat may have screwed up in their
login scripts.  On my RH 6.2 system, I went and commented out three
lines in /etc/bashrc:

    if [ "x`tput kbs`" != "x" ]; then # We can't do this with "dumb"
terminal
        stty erase `tput kbs`
    fi

It just seems to screw things up (like make vi and other programs
produce "^?" when you hit backspace..)

Anyway..

Keybindings are such a mess.  Everything has it's own, and they all seem
to conflict with each other somehow.  vi can be terrible with
nonstandard keyboard layouts (like Dvorak), especially if you are
running a version that doesn't understand the concept of arrow keys. 
Doing shift-backspace in Emacs causes bad things to happen.  I'm really
getting tired of Pico, and I'm sure there's a decent alternative that I
just haven't found.

I want this:  An editor that can understand all of my nice keys that I
used to use when I ran DOS -- arrows, delete, insert, home, and end
should all work in a nice and/or easily re-configurable manner
(personally, I prefer home and end to go to the beginning and end of a
line on the screen, rather than the beginning and end of a document, or
the beginning and end of a line that wraps around the screen). 
Selecting text using shift-arrow was nice.  Fortunately, Linux seems to
understand shift-insert for paste (though it locks up Netscape..).  

I also (need)/(really, really want) to have colorized text.  I know this
is a feature on many editors, but it's never easy to find.  I'd rather
have it default to displaying in color if the terminal can handle it. 
(I also think that all Linux distributions should default to using `ls
--color=auto -F' but I must just be weird..)  Also, I want the editor to
be a bit smarter about line wrapping.  Files that end in .c, .html, and
other well-known source file formats should automatically disable line
wrapping.

After using Linux for a while, I think the PC DOS 7.0 edit command was
probably one of the best editors I've seen.  I'm not sure if it had
color highlighting, but it had a nice command line interface
(unfortunately, I never figured it out until far too late).  To do a
global search-and-replace in your document, hit [ESC] (to get to the
command line), then type `s/original/replacement/g'.  Anyone who has
used sed or perl knows this syntax.  It certainly wasn't the perfect
editor (I seem to recall being forced to page through large amounts of
documentation just to figure out how to save anything), but something to
consider as a model.

It's after 2:30, and I shouldn't be awake.  I'm done now..

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   If you think nobody cares 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   about you, try missing a  
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]