Re: [TCLUG:19757] Editors, keybindings, color, etc. (was: Emacs HTMLmode)

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

Heh, I thought I'd be summarily flamed..

Luke Francl wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Mike Hicks wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > 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..).
> 
> Vim has a nice interface for this which I just learned about: hit "v" to
> enter "visual mode" then move your selection around with the arrow or
> movement keys. It selects blocks of text. "V" does whole lines and
> "^V" does text veritcally!

That's neat.  While I don't particularly go for the use of `v' (like I
said, I'd rather use shift for selecting text), I like the fact that
there are several different modes.

Getting back to the home, end, delete, insert keys, I realized a while
after I started using Linux that I was not able to use those keys in
most situations, and it got really annoying.  Now, after using pico for
so long, I don't use home and end much anymore.  To get to the end of a
line, I go down a line, get to the beginning of that line, and do one
more left-arrow keystroke to get to the end of the previous line.  It
really annoys me that this doesn't work in vi, as the arrow keys won't
wrap around to the next/previous line when you reach the beginning or
end.

> > 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.
> 
> Does anyone know how to turn this on in plain Emacs? I know it's possible,
> but I don't know how!

I found the option once or twice (by going through the menus), but I
never figured out how to save that configuration.  However, once it was
enabled, it also caused anything you printed to be in color as well. 
Not such a good thing if you only have a B&W laser printer, or if your
colors don't display well on white (such as yellow..)

> Again, Vim does pretty nice colorized text, but it only seems to work well
> in the console and in rxvt -- everything else looks awful, and since at
> work I can't use either of those, I can't use syntax coloring.

Oh yeah..  `syntax highlighting' -- that's the word I was looking for..

> I also wish Vim was smarter about indents, like Emacs.

I'm probably crazy to ask about this, as I don't know if it's a feature
I'd like at all, but is there an editor out there that can do automatic
`style'?  I only ask because there are different projects out there that
like to format things in different ways.  Some want you to declare
functions like

  int myfunc1() {
    printf("Hello.\n");
    return 0;
  }

While others (like GTK/Gnome) want formatting to look more like

  char *
  myfunc2 (char *str)
  {
    printf ("Hello\n");
    return str;
  }

It would be nice if you could just flip a switch somewhere and change
formatting, either of a source file you already have, or something that
will automatically re-arrange things as you type them in.  However, this
kind of scares me -- I know how Word and other programs do similar
things which end up just confusing people.  Definitely not an option
that I'd turn on by default..

> > 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.
> 
> vi never wraps lines, which is annoying for writing long things (which is
> why I'm writing in Emacs right now).

Yeah, there should be some sort of save mode that acts like Netscape's
plaintext message composer.  After you finish the message, all of the
lines get wrapped around at a certain number of characters.  Any lines
that start with `>' or other characters used for quoting should not be
wrapped.  I actually really like Netscape's composer as an editor.  I
guess the Motif text widget must be really good.  I don't particularly
like the text editing widget in Gtk, as it doesn't let the home and end
keys work in a way that I like (well, maybe there's an option
somewhere...).  If a line wraps around, the home and end keys can take
you to the beginning or end of an entire paragraph.  Yucky..

> > 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.
> 
> You mean, like vi?
> :s/original/replacement/g

Oops..  yeah.  vi is very close in many ways to what I'd really like in
an editor, though I've pointed out some of the things I don't like.  I
personally wish that there was a good menuing system that would allow
new users to quickly and easily learn how to use it.  The menus in gvim,
for example, have been only marginally helpful in showing me what
keystrokes to use.

> I've heard that Nedit is a really nice editor, but I've never used it. You
> might want to try that.

[http://nedit.org/ for those that want to check it out..]

Looks pretty nice, though I'm opposed to depending upon Motif/Lesstif
whenever possible..  I really should give it a try, though..

> Still trying to find the perfect editor,
> Luke

Heh, well it doesn't help that many editors that are in common use today
on Linux and Unix were first created for use on very slow terminals. 
There are some editors for DOS, in comparison, that were very good
because they didn't have to deal with the limitations of running over
slow links -- they could just access the video card directly.

Hmm..  must do some more thinking..

-- 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]