Editor [was: Re: DR-DOS]

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 06:53:18PM +0100, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> But only someone who thinks that Emacs or Vi are usable editors could
> think this was an appealing virtualisation solution.

Oh my, I know you are not offensive and I think flame over editors is
really stupid thing to do, but whenever I read I could do something
better, yet without hint how to change for the better, it is an itch
to scratch for me. So, with half of my tongue in a cheek, which
editors should I choose from - sed, ed, cat, joe, dd?

Requirement: __has_to__ work on a terminal without loss of
functionality (even though 99% of my editing happens in X, and I can
live with "some" loss), no Javascript inside (mostly, because I am not
willing to learn this anytime soon).

Right now, the best choice for me is emacs - lots of configurability,
I can take Elisp to another emacs and hopefully it will work there,
too. It requires bit of caution, I use one very old one (from very old
Linux which I will not upgrade to another Linux) and newer one,
handcompiled. So there is some conflict of available features, but
most of the time, not a big problem. I tried packages (via elpa?) and
it was not good (at one point, emacs no longer booted), so I guess I
will have to devise something of my own to play with other people's
code (or have deep look at elpa). One choice leads to another, so
nowadays I am writing my own snippets in Elisp. Because if one wants
this frog, then eating it is inevitable.

Customization in Elisp is very cool thing (IMHO). There is a number of
things that would irritate me (like hell) but can be mitigated after
bending some code for an hour or a five. Stuff like black mouse
pointer over black background (now it is hot pink, very hard to miss
it). The idea here is that of "five hours of bending, five years of
not having to bend it again". We will see how this bet plays out but
even if I had to bend it every second month, it is still huge plus
over cost of being irritated. However, my emacs config claims to have
started in 1999, and I mostly have no idea when I had to edit most of
the old code there (quite often it was just copy-pasted from blogs,
with only minimal understanding what I was doing). Anyway, this bet is
probably reasonable.

Vi (vim/gvim) is nice too, and quick, but not so often used.

Both work over wire. I might be editing this email with one of them.

Of course I will gladly learn about other choices. Seriously. What
others are using?

> Did I mention my more or less complete and utter loathing for C21 computing?

I guess a lot of people do, too.

> Why do you think I'm playing with MS-DOS again after 20y?

I can see your loathing is bigger than mine... ("Spaceballs")

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **