fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) (02/27/89)
This note is just in response to a number of mail messages
from various people showing an interest in the CRISP editor
I recently mentioned.
It is not yet currently available over usenet/bitnet.
It is available on the BIX conferencing system in
the grief.listings area if anyone has access to that.
I would like to make it available if anyone can tell
me where to post it such that it wont take 3 or more months to
appear on the net.
The version on BIX is slightly out of date (version 1.7).
If anyone has any more questions, please e-mail.
=====================
// o All opinions are my own.
(O) ( ) The powers that be ...
/ \_____( )
o \ |
/\____\__/ Tel: +44 628 891313 x. 212
_/_/ _/_/ UUCP: fox%marlow.uucp@idec.stc.co.ukfritz@friday.UUCP (Fritz Whittington) (03/03/89)
In article <551@alice.marlow.uucp> fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) writes: > >I would like to make it available if anyone can tell >me where to post it such that it wont take 3 or more months to >appear on the net. [[Mail to you on this subject was bounced.]] I suggest doing what rich $alz recently did with some sources of his own: 1) Post them to alt.sources. Add a note at the top that you have tested on certain machines and flavor(s) of OS, and provide an e-mail address for collecting bug reports and porting difficulties. 2) After a sufficient shake-down period, incorporate the reported improvements and post to comp.sources.unix. Post patches to alt.sources. This allows people who are anxious to try it out to get the current version quickly; they also understand that it may cause some problems. The patches allow the early implementors to bring their copy up to the same level as the comp.sources.unix posting without waiting for it. If you don't get alt.sources, you need to recruit a volunteer to handle this for you. Perhaps someone with both Usenet and BIX access could do it most easily. ---- Fritz Whittington Texas Instruments, Incorporated I don't even claim these opinions myself! MS 3105 UUCP: killer!ernest!friday!fritz 8505 Forest Lane AT&T: (214)480-6302 Dallas, Texas 75243
fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) (03/11/89)
This message is to compare some of the features of CRISP vs. vi for example. It is in request to a mail message by irv@happym.wa.com. He points out that a lot of people may not appreciate why yet another editor is foistered on the world at large and wanted me to make some comments to maybe show you vi-hackers what you are missing. So here goes. CRISP is similar in many respects to Emacs. It is very far removed from vi. The single most advantageous point about CRISP and editors like it is that they avoid you having to print out listings. Let me try to explain why. When you use an editor like vi, it has a pretty sophisticated set of capabilities, but you unrealisingly end up manually doing things which the editor should help you out with. A lot of people - especially programmers etc can spend 50% or more of their working time inside an editor. Vi presents you with a 24+ line window around the current cursor position. Often you may be editing a file and you need to look at the top of the file, eg for the declarations, or you need to look at a .h file to see some structure information, etc. Vi offers you commands like <Ctrl-^> to flip between files and various registers to save your current cursor position. However vi's idea of editing multiple files really only extends to two files at a time - the current one and the last one. Vi has many nice little features which make programming a joy - my personal best are the '%' command for matching brackets coupled with the various shift-in and shift-out features, and the tags command which will take you to any function definition. This is where it ends - people have complained about modes and modelessness as being a good/bad thing. I dont want to start a religious war - but to a certain extent you either love vi or you hate it. Most newcomers hate it until they learn it really well. CRISP and editors like crisp take you out of this and allow you to design your own editor. CRISP, EMACS and the other variants have a fully fledged programming langugae for customising the editor to your liking. Unfortunately no one is really interested in my language - you all have work to do. Learning an editing language is a chore at best. So the idea is that CRISP and Emacs come with a base set of macros to help those newcomers get to grips with editor within MINUTES of starting to use them. After that its up to you to decide whether you want to delve into the depths etc. Now what makes CRISP and BRIEF so good are the following features. Some are shared with Emacs. Remember I ventured on the design of CRISP because _I_ didnt know how to use Emacs at the time. Had I had the full GNU Emacs I wouldnt have ventured to start this. I only had MicroEmacs at the time and _no_ manual. If you are a well versed Emacs user, then you can probably ignore CRISP you may find it limiting. If you are a vi user then read on: 1. Vi has great problems in moving text around. If you want to delete a block of text you usually have to count lines. You can use the registers of vi to mark the block and then cut the text - but you usually make a mistake and have to rely on the U or u commands to get it right. CRISP hilites the area you are about to cut/copy. On monochrome displays its standard reverse video. On a color display you can make the highlited text any color you like. You are not limited to cutting words or lines but can have rectangualr regions, etc. 2. Color. Vi has no concept of color. To those of you who only have monochrome terminals skip this bit. For those of you running Unix on a PC type machine and usually have EGA or VGA, then color is a godsend. It makes the user interface look really sexy - although its all a matter of taste and color offers no functionality enhancement except possibly the human brain can focus its attention on the text display rather than the status lines, or whatever. 3. CRISP supports the tags and brace matching facility via its macros. If you dont like the way I've done it feel free to change it. 4. CRISP allows you to have as many windows onto as many different files as you want (subject to a minimum window width of about 16 characters and a window height of 3 lines). The current user interface is mostly tiled based, but there is nothing stopping anyone having overlapping windows. I keep thinking about writing macros to support this. 5. CRISP supports sub-processes in windows. Coupled with (4) above, CRISP could be seen as a superior (in some ways) version of the 'screen' program recently posted on the net. You can run multiple sub-processes. CRISPs support of sub-processes is limited in various ways, eg you cannot run a 'vi' session in one of these windows, but for 95% of the things you might want to do, eg compilation, list directory etc, it suffices. CRISP does NOT support the pty device but uses normal pipes to a sub-shell. This is done for maximal portability and because of laziness on my part to read the manual pages for the pty device. I hate sprinkling my code with too many #ifdefs. 6. CRISP supports multiple keyboard macros - similar to the vi map command but not as difficult to use. CRISP does not support abbreviations. 7. CRISP supports an indefinite level of undo. The undo facility is a nuisance. Vi supports only a single level of undo - if you make a mistake - you can undo it. If you didnt mean to undo it, you can undo the undo. In the present version of CRISP if you undo something you have lost that information forever. You cannot undo an undo. People have asked for a 'redo' facility, and I am experimenting with one now. However the semantics of a redo are pretty nasty. 8. You can execute a grep command and have the output go to a pop-up window. You can move around this window and when you hit return, CRISP takes you to that line in the appropriate file. No more ':!grep fred *.c' and then immediately forgetting what grep printed when you redraw vi's screen. A make and lint macro avoid the necessity for leaving crisp to do compilations. Any errors in your files are indicated by allowing you to skip to each file with an error in turn. There are many of these 'nice' little macros. Emacs has more. 9. Lots more features that probably arent worth talking about. The point is, if you are a pure vi user, then CRISP/Emacs, etc offer you a programmers dream environment, where by you never need to leave the editor. You never need a printout. Ask yourself why you print out listings - its usually so you can see a large fraction of the code at once eg 66 lines on a page. You usually want to see large portions because you want to check that two places in your code agree with each other, eg a function declaration and definition. With multiple windows you have each in its own window. If you are looking at someone elses code, you can use the tags facility to wander aronud the source code from function to function. CRISP has an index function which produces a pop-up window of all functions in the current .c file, or all typedef/struct definitions in a .h file (plus many more variants). If you use nroff/troff a lot, there is an index function for the sections in a document - a bit like a poor man's outline facility, but it does avoid you needing to keep printing things out and losing your train of thought. I've said too much already. CRISP was originally designed to be a BRIEF editor clone, but I've extended it more to be much more functional. Some aspects of it really need experimenting with because the documentation (as with all p.d. software) is not as good as it should be. But everyone I know who has used CRISP or BRIEF hates to be with out it. -- ===================== Paul Fox Tel: +44 628 891313 x. 212 ..................... UUCP: fox%marlow.uucp@idec.stc.co.uk
fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) (06/07/89)
Well, you will be sad to know that I have resigned from Reuters. In case you dont know who I am - I am the author of the CRISP editor recently posted on the net. As of today I am not sure what I shall be doing at the end of June, and it may be that I will not be available on the network. What this means is is that I cannot properly support the software whilst I'm off the air, and so if you have any queries I will not be available. If there is anyone out there who would like to act as a buffer for questions, then maybe we can keep in touch via paper mail ? If/when I get back on to the network, I shall post another news letter to tell you how to reach me. Sorry for all this, but due to circumstances beyond my control (ie incompetent senior management) I no longer have the conviction of working for this company. -- ===================== Reuters Ltd PLC, Tel: +44 628 891313 x. 212 Westthorpe House, UUCP: fox%marlow.uucp@idec.stc.co.uk Little Marlow, Bucks, England SL7 3RQ
neubauer@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Paul Neubauer) (06/09/89)
In article <649@alice.marlow.uucp> fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) writes: >Well, you will be sad to know that I have resigned from >Reuters. In case you dont know who I am - I am the author >of the CRISP editor recently posted on the net. I am sorry to hear that Paul Fox may no longer have net access, but I am posting to ask WHERE the sources were posted. I do read comp.sources.misc and several other source groups, but have not seen CRISP. Has it in fact been posted yet? I am particularly interested in editors that can be used on VMS with a generic (i.e., non-DEC, non-VT) terminal. Unix is no problem, but I would not mind being able to use the same editor on both. Currently I am using jove on unix (4.3 BSD) and (a rather hacked) EVE on VMS when I do have DEC compatibility and mg when I don't. I have not been completely satisfied with mg, but EDT in line mode is definitely not acceptable. (Actually, even in full-screen mode, EDT is pretty pathetic, but I guess that's a religious question. :-) Thanks for any information. -- Paul Neubauer neubauer@bsu-cs.bsu.edu neubauer@bsu-cs.UUCP <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!neubauer
dick@slvblc.UUCP (Dick Flanagan) (01/05/90)
In article <83@slvblc.UUCP> I wrote: >I just obtained a copy of the Grief (DOS Brief clone) V1.2 editor (dated June >1988) and was wondering if a more recent version might be available? I would like to thank the following net readers for responding to my request for help: djm@twiddle.eng.umd.edu (David J. MacKenzie) uunet!abhg!misko (William Miskovetz) ucscc!sco!att!pegasus!dmt uunet!moldev!geo (George Pontis) uunet!mdi386!bruce (Bruce A. McIntyre) uunet!tron!moran (Harvey R Moran) las@cbema.att.com (Larry A Shurr) With their help I was able to locate "Crisp," which is what the Grief editor was renamed to (at the request of the Brief folks). Crisp 1.9 was posted to comp.sources.misc about six months ago and I was able to get a copy from the uunet archives. (All 33 parts of it!) I have directed all Follow-ups to comp.unix.xenix because now my problem is not locating Crisp, but in getting it to run in my SCO XENIX 286 SYS V 2.3.2 environment. When trying to execute it, I get an immediate segmentation error during startup. Does anyone have any experience running Crisp in a 286 environment? Under XENIX? Any ideas? Suggestions? Again, I will summarize any relevant information I am able to come up with. Thanks to all for helping! Dick -- Dick Flanagan, W6OLD, CFII, CFIG Cherokee 235 N9212W UUCP: ...!uunet!slvblc!dick GEnie: FLANAGAN Internet: slvblc!dick@uunet.UU.NET POB 155, Ben Lomond, CA 95005
rob@vicom.com (Rob Larmour) (02/02/90)
Could someone please direct me as to where the CRISP editor for unix might be acquired. I am presently working on a sun3 under Sunos 4.0.3. Please e-mail me or post on the net. Thanx -- Robert Larmour ames!vsi1!rob rob@vicom.com
magnuson@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Randy Magnuson) (07/20/90)
Can someone please tell me where I can get a copy of Crisp? -- Randy R. Magnuson magnuson@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com (612-542-5052) magnuson@src.honeywell.com (612-782-7677)
iain@newsserver.sfu.ca (Iain McVey) (06/05/91)
I am told that CRISP is now a pay-ware product. Can anyone confirm this? Can anyone point me at a distributer? Wondering, Iain McVey - iain@ucs.sfu.ca | "...pioneers end up with Advisor, Distributed Computing Support Group | arrows in their backs. It's Computer Services, Simon Fraser University | the settlers who reap the Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6 | benefits." John Perry Barlow -- Iain McVey - iain@ucs.sfu.ca | "...pioneers end up with Advisor, Distributed Computing Support Group | arrows in their backs. It's Computer Services, Simon Fraser University | the settlers who reap the Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6 | benefits." John Perry Barlow
jtt@tct.com (John Tombs) (06/06/91)
In article <1991Jun4.231440.15123@newsserver.sfu.ca> iain@newsserver.sfu.ca (Iain McVey) writes: >I am told that CRISP is now a pay-ware product. >Can anyone confirm this? >Can anyone point me at a distributer? CRISP 2.0 is currently at a number of beta sites. CRISP 2.1 is about to be released as shareware, $60. Well worth it, in my opinion. I would expect archive sites to be announced shortly. There is a CRISP mailing list: info from owner-crisp-list@uunet.uu.net. -- John Tombs at Teltronics/TCT <jtt@tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!jtt>