Sorry for the fwd:fwd..i had some mail issues
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Begin forwarded message:
From: pancake <panc...@youterm.com>
Date: October 5, 2009 3:32:53 PM GMT+02:00
To: panc...@youterm.com
Subject: Fwd: [dev] Suckless word processing solution?
Begin forwarded message:
From: pancake <panc...@youterm.com>
Date: October 5, 2009 3:04:00 PM GMT+02:00
To: dev mail list <dev@suckless.org>
Subject: Re: [dev] Suckless word processing solution?
I know that it may sound like reinventing the wheel.. Because it is
in fact the wheel reinvented.
Vi is the visual ed, but I have never seen any implementation using
ed. They just embed it inside the 'GUI' .
I think that having all the editing engine implemented in ed is
simple to wrap it into a GUI based on X11 or ncurses.
Vim supports launching apps to filter text, but it is not the main
way to work. Because is more optimal and easy to port to other os
like dos or w32.
Syntax highlighting is something that can be implemented in a
filter program. The same for indent, line numbering, text
alignment, etc..
I love vim, but I feel that most of the capabilities it supports
are embedded in the editor instead of using a unixlike design based
on pipes and filters.
Autocompletion, ctags, searchs,,.. Can be implemented outside the
GUI without much pain.
We just need a GUI that supports X11, ncurses, sdl or OpenGL that
allows to bind some keybindings to run commands at Ed level or
change the filters for example.
The main problem in this application is to find the good
simplification of the design to allow good flexibility, performance.
Yep, it's the wheel problem again, but I'm just trying to give some
spots on things that have been already thinked probably in the past.
Acme from plan9 is an interesting approach, but it is unusable and
inproductive if you don't want or have a mouse with 3 buttons. My
keyboard has at least 105 keys and there are some of them that are
still with no use.
I understand that having a pointer device as a selector input
hugely simplifies the code, but at least for me is not a solution
for eficient text editing.
It's like when people from notepad.exe discovers the magic of hjkl.
Efficient text ediing requires some training. And we have to find
an intermediate point between code complexity and user interface.
Any proposal?
On Oct 4, 2009, at 10:46 PM, Robert C Corsaro
<rcors...@optaros.com> wrote:
Jessta wrote:
On 04/10/2009, markus schnalke <mei...@marmaro.de> wrote:
[2009-10-01 13:51] pancake <panc...@youterm.com>
* ved (visual mode for ed..like vim, but using ed, indent,
etc.. that
is
reimplement the basics of visual text editor using ed and other
scripts as backend)
vi is the visual mode for ed (for ex, to be exact). It can also
invoke
arbitrary external programs.
Why reinvent the wheel?
That cliche really annoys me. The wheel has been constantly
reinvented
for thousands of years and there are currently companies spending
millions of dollar researching how they can reinvent it again.
vi is a terrifying beast, I imagine pancake was thinking of making
something less terrifying.
I imagine that any editor that is optimized to make editing
extremely quick and efficient will be a terrifying beast. I
respect the opinion that vi sucks, but I don't respect that
opinion that text editing should be so simple to learn that my
grandmother could do it. I edit text 8+ hours a day so I don't
mind spending some time learning to be more efficient.
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