🚀 go-pugleaf

rhodesia@wixer.cactus.org (Felix S. Gallo) writes:

>9118543@sunvax.sun.ac.za writes:
>>Is there no better editor for UNIX than VI?
>>I mean... what happened to the good old full screen ones?
>>Cheers
>>Christ

>psst.  vi is full screen; also, the relative 'goodness' of an
>editor depends on what you're trying to do.  For instance, if
>you're trying to have a completely integrated one-program
>environment that reads news and everything, check out gnuemacs.
>If you can't stand these fancy newfangled "tools", use cat.
>If you live modally, vi is for you.

Full screen: in some sense, vi is. But not screen-oriented. Changing 
or inserting text and not seeing the result unless a finish key is 
pressed is certainly not the behaviour I would wish from an interactive 
editor - it reminds a lot of old batch-time editing programs.
Vi is a line editor with on-screen display. Actually, I wouldn't even 
call it a text editor since (according to some recent discussion in this 
group) it is not even capable of performing one of the most elementary 
text editing tasks: marking an arbitrary (!) block of text and by some 
means copying or moving it to another place.
As a reaction to my moroseness about the apparent unavailability of a 
simple text editor for Unix and the monstrous complexity and slowness 
of the only widely spread alternative (emacs), I captured the source 
of a freely available editor and turned it into a safe, fast, and easy 
to use text editor. (I also announced it to this group some time ago.)
It is available by ftp from ftp.fu-berlin.de [130.133.4.50]:
/pub/unix/editor/mined.tar.Z (108841 bytes)
/pub/pc/editor/mined_pc.zip (114522 bytes)

Thomas
wolff@inf.fu-berlin.de