🚀 go-pugleaf

tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:

>There are books on vi available.  Go to a good technical bookstore.

Why are there no manuals? Shouldn't there be some authoritative document
somewhere that says that this is vi? I generally found that books on
editors (I am speaking from experience of reading books for IBM
mainframe packages like DB2, ISPF and VM/CMS) or other vendor software
usually for those who do not like manuals. But I like manuals, I like to
read them from cover to cover before starting anything. I cannot find a
good definitive manual that gives command syntax in alphabetical order
with a good index for vi. Could you please suggest how I would go about
ordering one? What are the manual numbers? How about emacs? From where
can I get the manuals?

>Not exactly, but I think I can probably do anything you would like
>done.  Post your problem, I'll post an answer.

Here they are.

1. The join should flow till the next blank line. Not just join together
two lines. If I have the margin or some such set at say 72 cols., when I
do a join, I have to reformat the entire para by going to the
appropriate word (I have to judge this visually) and then split and then
join and so on.

2. I want to exclude some number of line from a file I am editing. Like
\begin{enumerate}
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\begin{enumerate}
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\end{enumerate}
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\item 
\end{enumerate}

And if I mark the first \item line and the last \item line and exclude
all the lines between the marks, I need to see some thing like 

\begin{enumerate}
...............................21 lines excluded....................
\end{enumerate}

I found the above feature to be invaluable in concentrating on parts of
the file which are separated from each other. I can do marking and go
back and and forth. But I would never get a complete picture of the
whole thing. This is like an overview. It will also help in matching
paranthesis, begin ends blocks etc. There may be some automatic matching
that can be done on vi I am sure which I surely want, but this feature
of ISPF would be quite useful for me because I can get an overview of
a large part of the document.

3. Once you give me the above, I should be able to find say some string
only within the excluded lines, or only within the unexcluded lines. If
it is found in the excluded lines, those lines should be unexcluded.
ex. /enum/x

should give

\begin{enumerate}
............................... 6 lines excluded....................
\begin{enumerate}
............................... 7 lines excluded....................
\end{enumerate}
............................... 6 lines excluded....................
\end{enumerate}

4. Is it possible to make the marks visible? Do it only when the line
numebring is set. Like as follows.

      1  This is my firts lin.
      2  This is my second line.
      a  this is line labeled a.
      4  This is the 4th line.
      b  This line is marked with b.

5. How do I get just the name of the file I am editing right now?
Because, for example if I want to say run this file through a filter and
save the output in a file with the same name but different extension,
can I do this?

Please by no means think that I am trying to prove that vi is really bad
or anything, the above are somethings which I honestly like to have and
do not have in vi, which I like more than emacs. If I have to chose
between these two (because I am stuck with UNIX for rest of my life), I
would like to make one of these my standard editor. All the emacs gurus,
please post (or e-mail) your solutions too. If there are enough requests from
ISPFPhiles, I'll post them here.

By the way Tom, thanks for the .exrc
It seems to be very interesting.

See you all later

Anil Joshi
--
"Whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.  If what
we are now has been the result of our own past actions,then it certainly follows
that whatever we wish to be in the future, can be produced by our own present 
actions. how to act." - Vivekananda, Late Nineteenth Century Indian Philosopher