sasaki@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU (Marty Sasaki) (09/03/85)
I got very excited when I heard about both TPU and SMG. Here was a
chance to have a very snazzy text editor that would run on any
terminal if I was willing to do a bit of hacking. I could throw away
my horribly kludged port of VI and write something in TPU that would
be a "close enough" VI for almost all of my UNIX transplants. Then I
would modify Eve to be "close enough" to EMACS to satisfy myself.
When the presentation of TPU that I was listening to got around to
efficiency, I realized that there was no hope. A question confirmed my
fears, TPU doesn't use SMG because it wouldn't be efficient enough.
One of the design goals was to create a screen editor that would run
faster than EDT.
When I heard the presentation at New Orleans about the Language
Sensitive Editor my excitement for TPU was totally gone. LSE is
implemented in Bliss. If TPU was so great, and so flexible, and so
efficient, why wasn't LSE written in TPU? TPU didn't provide the
functionality that LSE needed.
The fact that only ANSI CRTs are supported is disappointing, but not
surprising. Remember EDT only worked on DEC terminals.
I'm putting my efforts into GNU EMACS. If someone would like to help,
I'm organized enough now that I can subcontract some of the code.
----------------
Marty Sasaki net: sasaki@harvard.{arpa,uucp}
Havard University Science Center phone: 617-495-1270
One Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138