ebr@eddie.mit.edu (Evan B. Ross) (02/14/89)
I don't want to start a religious war, but I'm a 'vi' user who is looking
for something better. Does anybody know of any decent programmer's editors
for unix/sun besides Emacs? I've tried my hand at gnuemacs, but I have
found it much to slow and cumbersome.
Considering the variety of editors available for pc's, I'm surprised at
the seeming scarcity of them for workstations.
...!{mit-eddie,bbn}!ileaf!ebr Evan B. Ross, Interleaf, Cambridge, Ma
ebr@ileaf.com (617)577-9813 x5570day@uunet.uu.net (Dave Yost) (02/23/89)
ileaf!ebr@eddie.mit.edu (Evan B. Ross) writes: >I don't want to start a religious war, but I'm a 'vi' user who is looking >for something better... What? Neither vi nor emacs satisfies you? Join the club. Look in your Sun Catalyst catalogue for the blurb on the Grand Editor. --dave yost
bet@orion.mc.duke.edu (Bennett Todd) (02/28/89)
I personally prefer an EMACS-style editor over vi(1); I use GNU Emacs for tasks where its power seems justified, but when I just want to edit a file I use JOVE -- Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS. It has the user interface and much of the power of EMACS, but consumes no more resources than vi(1), and is portable across UNIX and microcomputers (ports exist to MS-DOS and Macintosh). On the one hand it doesn't have ELISP, or many of the more amazing GNU EMACS packages that are written in ELISP; on the other hand, it is only a few hundred Kbytes, it handles multiple windows on multiple files, it has the rebindable keyboard, keyboard macros, interactive shell windows, regular expression handling, and suchlike features that I routinely want in an editor, and it has enough of the nice frills (compile-it in particular) to feel reasonably cushy. Check it out. I scarfed my version via anonymous FTP from cs.rochester.edu. -Bennett bet@orion.mc.duke.edu
maeder@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Roman E. Maeder) (03/01/89)
You might want to have a look at textedit, the SunView editor. "Real programmers" generally frown upon full screen editors (and use emacs of course) but I am quite happy with it. Once you learn to use the mouse and the buttons on the left hand side of the keyboard it is very fast. You can cut and paste without using the menu in this way. You can also pipe portions of your text through external filters (a C formatter for example). The big advantage of SunView over other window environments (a la Macintosh) is that it does not insist in treating you like a beginner all the time. Once you know all the shortcuts and key combinations, it is very efficient. Roman E. Maeder maeder@symcom.math.uiuc.edu Department of Mathematics and Center for Supercomputing Research and Development Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
dharvey@uunet.uu.net (Doug Harvey) (03/17/89)
maeder@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Roman E. Maeder) writes: >You might want to have a look at textedit, the SunView editor.... Unfortunately, textedit does a poor job as an editor. Macros, global search and replace? Forget it. Regular expressions, case-insensitive finds? Only a memory. For better or worse, I'm a devoted 'vi' user. What I *DO* use textedit for is browsing and lightweight editing. It is fast and can handle large files quite easily. Just thought I would throw my two cents in. Doug Douglas Harvey UUCP: {uunet.uu.net}!edsews!mancer!dharvey Electronic Data Systems ARPA: edsews!mancer!dharvey@uunet.uu.net (313) 556-0791
barnett@crdgw1.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (03/31/89)
mancer!dharvey@uunet (Doug Harvey) writes: > Unfortunately, textedit does a poor job as an editor. Macros, global > search and replace? Forget it. Textedit does have shortcomings, but it does support macros. Whatever operations you do without changing the insertion point is stored. The Again button does it again. So you can search for a string, delete the string, go forwards two words, insert a string, insert the deleted string, and insert another string, and then move down two lines. Press Again, and it does it again. Also - considering that you can exchange two pieces of text, of any size, from any text window, with just three keystrokes, it has more power than many people think. -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crdgw1.ge.com> a.k.a. <barnett@[192.35.44.4]> uunet!steinmetz!barnett, <barnett@steinmetz.ge.com> [[ From the description, I think claiming that textedit supports macros is stretching it a bit. How about "textedit supports a macro" instead? Macro support ought to at least include the ability to name and retain them. --wnl ]]
tom@icase.edu (Tom Crockett) (04/19/89)
> Unfortunately, textedit does a poor job as an editor. Macros, global > search and replace? Forget it. Regular expressions, case-insensitive > finds? Only a memory. I'm a long-term vi user who switched to emacs a few months ago, but was not entirely happy with it. In the last couple of months I've discovered the Andrew system's "ez" editor. It's a window- and mouse-based editor which also retains much of the flavor of emacs, and thus provides the capabilities listed above as missing from textview. I've found that cursor positioning and cutting and pasting with the mouse are really easy, but for those who prefer leaving their hands on the keyboard, there are emacs-style keystrokes as well which will do virtually everything. It's not perfect, but the more I use it the better I like it. It's not nearly as clumsy as emacs, and is probably easier to use than vi. Of course, there are some things that vi and emacs can do better. By default ez uses a variable-width character font, so it's hard to line things up in nice neat columns for subsequent printing, but it's possible to override the defaults. Of course, you have to be running Andrew on top of X to use ez -- it won't buy you anything from suntools. Tom Crockett Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering M.S. 132C e-mail: tom@icase.edu NASA Langley Research Center phone: (804) 864-2182 Hampton, VA 23665