On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 04:54:53PM +0200, Laurent Bercot wrote: > On 27/05/2015 12:12, Hendrik Boom wrote: > >I'm in the process of writing (yet) a(nother) editor and output formatter, > >and on reading this, I started to wonder -- just how could one separate > >a command-line version from the UI? I can see that the output > >formatter can be so separated (and very usefully), but the actual > >editing? > > Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, as I'm unfamiliar with the > internal of editors. But IIUC, an editor is, by definition, a user > interface, so the command-line / UI separation looks impossible or > irrelevant to me here. > However, there are still some separations that you can perform when > designing an editor. Right off the top of my head: > - Core functions vs. actual interface, which could be terminal-based > or X-based. Think vim vs. gvim, or emacs -nw. > - programmable editor commands vs. interface to enter those commands. > Think the sed engine in vi, or the LISP engine in emacs. > > If you factor your work correctly, it should be trivial for a program > to get access to your editor commands via a library function call - and > you can make a command-line tool to wrap useful calls. Also, there could
nvi (the Berkeley rewrite of vi, after abandoning their first version) uses a shared backend (vi-ipc) connected to the frontend via pipe(). There are about four frontends: terminfo-based (curses was derived from the code for this), tk, motif, and gtk. I ended up finding out this as a result of making the motif frontend build/work again. Thanks, Isaac Dunham _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
