[comp.sys.atari.st] editors: VI, EMACS

Yonderboy@cup.portal.com (Christopher Lee Russell) (12/27/90)

There are about a thousand different version of VI and EMACS on the lists 
of Panarthea@sun.com and Atari.archive...  Does anybody have any opinions
about which ones are best..  That GNU emacs looks huge, any advantage to it?
I have been using SteVIe, but recently I have been getting errors loading in
large files and it is kinda slow compared to some of the other editors I have
been using..  Is Elvis any better?  How about Jove..  I would like to know
what other people are using for editors (especially for writting C source
code)...  VI seems to do about everything I want, but Emacs lets you have
multiple windows (at least the one built into Gulam)..  

Well, any opinoions?           ........Yonderboy@cup.portal.com

rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz) (12/28/90)

first, some info i was not able to mail to some people...

after posting mgif, i received several requests for PBMplus, which i mentioned
in the README file. as far as i know, there is no full port of PBMplus to
the ST, though it should be fairly simple with gcc (32-bit mode). it runs
mostly on unix boxes as far as i know. it was posted to comp.sources.unix
(or comp.sources.misc, i forget which) and should be available on one of the
archive sites for these groups (e.g. uunet.uu.net). in addition, there are
periodic additions to PBMplus which appear in alt.sources, too. i do know
that there is support in PBMplus for GEM files (i THINK these will be degas-ish
pi1, pi2, and pi3 files). PBM plus has its own formats for color, grayscale,
and other images and can convert between a whole slew of other formats
and do lots of image manipulations. it is a very nice package (and i wonder
why it has not been ported to the ST, at least parts of it). it is rather
large (several MB of source, as i recall).

on to other things...

In article <37252@cup.portal.com> Yonderboy@cup.portal.com (Christopher Lee Russell) writes:
>There are about a thousand different version of VI and EMACS on the lists 
>of Panarthea@sun.com and Atari.archive...  Does anybody have any opinions
>about which ones are best..

opinions? i got a million!

i have most of the zillion versions, collected over the years. i am an emacs
user, so naturally i prefer emacs (no flame wars on this...PLEASE!!!). of
all the emacs' out there, i prefer MicroEMACS, v 3.9n (i think i use "n").
i have 3.10something, but it no longer prints the status line in reverse
video, and it does not seem to offer more than improved mouse support,
which i don't use anyway. GNU emacs would be very attractive, but i could
not get it to run because it insists on having the termcap file end in
newlines (NOT cr-newlines, as is the convention with TOS/MSDOS text files).
that was quite a while ago, it may be "fixed" now. an added plus with GNU
emacs is the ability to use special elisp files to add new capabilites.
this is possible with MicroEMACS as well, though if u use GNU emacs on
another system, then u have little compatibility problems. both come with
source, so u can always "fix" things to your liking. i have edited files
larger than 150k bytes with microemacs with no problems. note that microemacs
lisp is NOT the same as GNU emacs lisp. someday, i'll set up a drive just
for all the GNU software, so i will probably end up with GNU emacs, if it
is not too big, even for my mega4 (which normally i have going with a 2 MB
ramdisk).

[incidently, if someone can tell me how to get the status line in rev video
 with MicroEMACS 3.10, i'd appreciate that. without a recompile, that is,
 since i believe i would have to port it to Alcyon (SHEESH!!) or get gcc
 up and running.]

i prefer emacs because of its language context sensitivity (in C and fortran
though i write very little fortran on the ST) and because at this point in
time, it is everywhere, at least in the unix world (what other world is
there? :-). by "everywhere", i mean most pcs (generic), workstations,
supers (yes, even cray :-) and minisupers, all the systems i am likely to
encounter for the next 100 years. the argument that vi exists everywhere
compared to emacs is no longer a valid one, IMHO.

it takes a bit longer, perhaps, to learn emacs (say 20% longer), but IMHO
it is a superior editor for programming. so if u are just learning an
editor, i'd recommend learning enuf of both vi and emacs (say 10-15 commands)
then pick one you feel more comfortable with and do most of your work with
it. vi is modal, too, in that there is an "input" mode and a "command" mode.
i personally hate that (there is no key marked "Esc" on a DECstation 3100,
for example. Esc is used to terminate "input" mode in vi. that does not mean
vi is bad, more probably it indicates DEC is not serious about unix. PLEASE,
no flames on that either! except from ken olson hisself :-).

of the various vi clones, i have made stevie 3.65 (or perhaps 3.95?) what
comes up when i say "vi file", though that is about twice a year, so ask
someone else about vi. it never bombed on me (i think elvis had some
problems, at least the early version i got). elvis seems to be the prefered
vi for Minix, though Minix itself has these limits on executable sizes,
at least on the PC version (64k text + 64k data) which can severly limit
what u can do.

enjoy...

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com
--
Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com

ralph@laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) (01/02/91)

In article <37252@cup.portal.com> Yonderboy@cup.portal.com (Christopher Lee Russell) writes:
|  There are about a thousand different version of VI and EMACS on the lists 
|  of Panarthea@sun.com and Atari.archive...  Does anybody have any opinions
|  about which ones are best..  That GNU emacs looks huge, any advantage to it?

It is Unix GNU emacs compatible for most everything (other than sub
processes).  The only thing is that it requires more than 1 Mb to do
anything interesting.  This doesn't mean to say that you cannot use on
a 1040 ST.  For certain functinality (such as bibtex-mode) it's the
only way to go!

|  but Emacs lets you have multiple windows (at least the one built
|  into Gulam)..

Also MG and UE310: all emacs!

Cheers,

--
Ralph P. Sobek			  Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own.
ralph@laas.fr				   Addresses are ordered by importance.
ralph@laas.uucp, or ...!uunet!laas!ralph		
If all else fails, try:				      sobek@eclair.Berkeley.EDU
===============================================================================
Proud new owner of a Mega 4 ST.  What should I do with my *small* SH204 drive?