On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 08:53:40 -0500, zMan wrote:
>Editors are religion, this entire discussion might should belong in
>alt.theology, but I have to admit I'm surprised that anyone likes SPF
>EDIT over XEDIT, simply because there's very little in SPF EDIT that
>you can't also do in XEDIT, and a lot more.
>
>Perhaps the antipathy comes from years of programming into the tips of
>the fingers that "A" means "After", not "Add", "FIND" instead of
>"LOCATE", and the like. It's always surprised me that XEDIT and SPF
>EDIT were so similar yet had so many of these (ultimately) trivial
>differences.
>
Moving from SPF EDIT to XEDIT, I defined prefix macros/synonyms
for these.
>Of course, in XEDIT you can put synonyms in your PROFILE to make it
>work very much like SPF EDIT...the opposite of which (I have to point
>out) you cannot do.
>
The one thing that infuriates me about XEDIT is its insistence
that any successful LOCATE scroll to place the target at a fixed
positon on the screen (combined with not reporting "no further
occurrences found", but merely wrapping to the beginning) Perhaps
XEDIT has got better in a few decades. But then I spent countless
man hours implementing PDF-like behavior with macros on ENTER and
various other keys. And implementing "scroll to CURSOR".
Moving back to PDF EDIT primarily (when I can't avoid using a
mainframe editor), I recognized these efforts as a massive waste
of time. I've left PDF alone. My chief complaint is ergonomic:
Instead of XEDIT's:
/foo bar<ENTER>
I'm required to type:
f 'foo bar'<ENTER>
... three needless keystrokes. Designers should recognize how
often such cliches will be performed and optimize them mercilessly
This is a rare instance where I prize brevity over lucidity.
(Otherwise, look at my scripts: I usen FIND, not F; ALLOCATE,
not ALLOC; TRANSMIT, not XMIT; I supply the optional adverbs in
CMS commands; etc.)
-- gil
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