From: Eric Jablow <ejablow at cox.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Editor Wars
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:18:52 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

On Mar 21, 2005, at 4:46 PM, Colleen Cahill wrote:

> vi rules!!!!
> (Colleen runs for cover)
>

ed is the standard text editor.

>> Before anyone jumps in and mentions emacs, I've never liked, or used,
>> emacs.  I tried using it a couple of times, but the command set
>> rapidly
>> exceeded my memory ability for storing random strings of meaningless
>> characters.  Sort of like teco that way.  Emacs is at least as
>> powerful as
>> TPU, but for me, unusable due to the user interface "design" and
>> choice of
>> macro programming language (which I've been told is LISP...I nearly
>> sprained my brain once trying to figure out how to write code in that
>> thing...CAR, CDR, CONS...).
>>

At one time, Emacs saved what little remained of my sanity.  I was
stuck on
a project using an orphan language, and there were no editing tools for
it.
Furthermore, management had somewhat odd formatting requirements that
ever obeyed.  And, they ran a preprocessor over our code that added
thousands of lines of junk.

I cored out the Emacs Modula 2 mode, turned it into a mode for our
language,
added syntax colorization, syntax skeleton commands, and finally tied
it into outline mode so that the added code was at the lowest level of
outlining.
I was able to hide it all.

Give it a try.

Respectfully,
Eric Jablow