john@renoir.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (02/16/87)
I'm working on an emacs-like editor for the text processing system we've been calling VorTeX here at Berkeley. At this point, I have an editor which runs under X with a built-in lisp interpreter (a real lisp, not a mock-lisp). It also supports multiple X windows. In designing the window interface, I added a level to the existing heirarchy established back in the days of terminals. Emacs' screen becomes one of (possbly) many frames and its windows becomes panes. (The change in terminology was necessary, we though, since window is such an overloaded term now). Instead of spreading the panes (emacs windows) over several X windows, we added a level. Frames (X windows) each have a minibuffer and a set of panes. The commands to split, resize and delete panes on a frame are analogous to those for emacs windows. And there are similar commands to split, delete and resize frames (and of course X can change the frames too). This is a simple generalization of the emacs window notion to multiple screens. We've run into relatively few difficulties so far with this approach. One serious one arises from the notion of multiple minibuffers (there is a separate buffer, a separate minibuffer, for each frame). The lisp I've written is still a single-threaded lisp interpreter, meaning that while one can initiate commands from different frames simultaneously, the commands cannot run simultaneously (thus, for one thing ^G must be global to all frames). I'm interested in what people think of this approach, especially those who've used a multiple-window editor. Feedback is always appreciated (but please mail to me, not to the newsgroup). The basic paradigm of emacs was well enough thought out that this extra level was easy to implement and to allow the same style of manipulation of frames that one has with panes (sorry about the terminology, sigh). I'm still impressed with the structure Stallman designed. John Coker University of California, Berkeley Berkeley VorTeX Project john@renoir.Berkeley.EDU
bh01@CLUTX.BITNET.UUCP (02/16/87)
Just goes to show you that every hacker writes his own editor sooner or later, and that everyone likes best the first editor they used. :-) I'm guilty of both of the above counts. Repeatedly. -russ