Re: [UUG/MLUG] simple text editor

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Jeff Thomas wrote:

> Pico is nice; I use it for simple tasks.  But it's not quite what I
> want/need for HTML.  I should have been a little more explicit as to
> the functionality I'm looking for.
> 
> It must have:
> 
> horizontal scrolling
> mulitple files at once
> mulitple undo/redo
> cut and paste
> 
> And it would be nice if it had:
> 
> auto-indent
> line numbering

And you probably wouldn't complain if it could (optionally) balance tags
for you and had a decent spell checker...

Really and truly, emacs (or, if you like a more GUI feel, Xemacs) is
probably not a bad choice for this.  I'm not sure exactly why you want the
infinite line length feature you mentioned, but you can get that, too.
 
> These are deceptively simple requirements... I haven't been able to find
> one yet, although I'm sure I haven't looked in all the right places. 
> The fewer features in addition to the ones above, the better.  

I know that emacs has a huge feature set, and that sometimes intimidates
people, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to ignore the stuff you
don't want or need, mostly because you have to ask for it explicitly.
I've been using some variety of emacs for 14 years now, and I've
successfully ignored 90% of its true capabilities. :-)

> It's proving difficult to find middle ground; they're too simple or
> too complicated.

Getting started with Xemacs is really pretty easy (hey, built-in
tutorial!).  Becoming a master is obviously much harder, but it's one
tool, kind of like perl, where mastery is not a necessary step.  And, if
you ever need to become an Editing God, you certainly won't need to switch
editors.

That being said, I know lots of people who are bullish on vi, and you've
heard pico fans chime in already, too.  The weird thing is, many people
over the years have tried to build a way-cool WYSIWIG unix-based text
editor, and many have succeeded, more or less, but none of these
projects end up with a huge user base.  I don't know why that it.

jking