urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) (09/30/90)
Is there a Mac-style text editor anywhere out there?
While TextEditor is a step in the right direction, several utterly necessary
features (IMHO) are missing:
- No word wrap. That's important for editing EMail letters.
- No regular expressions.
- No multiple launching ("Couldn't open resource file for launch").
What I'd like to see the editor do is to check if it's already running, and
if so, tell the active copy to open a file and come to the front. It would
then sleep until that file is closed again (obviously the active copy has to
send a signal), put the active copy behind the CommandShell (presumably
that's the best place), and exit. That way, one could use it as easily as vi.
I think emacs does something like this so that it can avoid the startup cost
(it's a very big editor), but I don't like emacs.
The above is very easy given a shared memory segment for the file name and
the process ID (startup), a semaphore (access to the shared segment), and a
signal (to tell the secondary that the file has been closed again). Given
the TextEditor source which I obviously don't have, I'd say one hour of
programming max.
Comments?
--
Matthias Urlichs -- urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de /(o\
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