At 19:41 -0500 9/9/04, Ian Ragsdale wrote: >Shell "worksheets" (allows easy editing & running of shell commands)
And there is by far the most important item. When the MacPerl port ran as an MPW tool it looked a whole lot like UNIX perl and you could run it from a command line, with arguments, and redirect output to another open window or to a file. Any open window, if it contained "shell" commands, could be invoked as a tool by simply naming it. I am told, by my son, that the best replacement for MPW in OS neXt is really emacs but it requires that I learn smalltalk or something similar and, though I have read the book, I just ain't there. X11 isn't that easy to use either with my four monitors. BBEdit worksheets are still fairly new and I really hope they will migrate more and more closely to either MPW or emacs. As of now even emacs is not a real shell having to pass commands to the user's chosen shell. That makes handling the environment a pain just as it is in BBEdit. Each open document has its own associated shell process which doesn't talk to the others. MPW was a shell, of sorts, but the underlying operating system didn't have shells so the point is moot. As of version 8 you cannot save a working BBEdit worksheet as an executable perl script. You must first convert to a normal BBEdit document and save that while adding the appropriate shebang line and executable permission bits. (Yes. you can muck with OS 9 file type and creator codes but it's not approved.) It is so much easier to select a few lines of text and execute them than it is to play keyboard games with history arrays. . . I wax happy about the concept but I miss OS 9 and MPW. BBEdit is the best choice right now. Every once in a while there is a burst of activity requesting a Carbon version of MPW. Should Apple decide to release the source code and provide some kernel hooks for intercepting read and write requests from compiled code it could become a real open-source competitor but BBEdit could easily beat it out by incorporating selected content from tcsh, or bash, so that BBEdit itself becomes a real boy -- er, a shell -- rather than a wooden one with a long nose.. -- --> Halloween == Oct 31 == Dec 25 == Christmas <--
