🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr16.033858.14459@watmath.waterloo.edu>
  ljdickey@watmath.waterloo.edu (L. J. Dickey) writes:
>One uses disk support rather than free Ram space, 
>even though the Ram space may be abundant.   Some safety in
>that, I suppose.

Elvis uses temporary disk files as does "real vi".  This makes it possible
to recover all but the latest editing change after a system crash.  It also
tends to keep the memory usage constant which is helpful when multitasking.
I have my mint.cnf set up to automatically check for and recover editor
files upon system booting (similar to vi under unix).

Two suggestions for elvis users:
  1) If you don't have a hard disk or just want to use ram for files,
     set up a ram disk and point elvis's tmp files to it.
  2) If you are using a hard disk and MiNT:  Set up a tmp directory on
     a minix file partition for elvis files.  Then in your elvis.rc,
     add the line "set nosync".  This will make file changes faster,
     eliminating occasional delays.  (Reason: TOS files must be closed
     and reopened to make sure current changes are flushed to disk--
     this has to do with updating the TOS file-size field.  Under TOS,
     elvis has the default "set sync" which sets the constant updating.
     Without this, file recovery breaks.  With a minix file system under
     MiNT, however, the tmp files remain consistant with "set nosync"
     and the delay is eliminated).

-- Scott Willingham // willing@icsl.ucla.edu