Re: Projectg Seagull was: OpenClassroom

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

On Sun, 8 Aug 1999, Ian Bicking wrote:

> I'm afraid pine and pico are both not Open Source.  I can't 
> remember the details, but there's something about not distributing 
> modified binaries.

My interpretation of their liscence didn't seem to forbid what I was
thinking, though obviously I ought to ask the developers first. One thing
I did notice is that pico developed from a program called weemacs, which
developed from MicroEmacs, so it might have been more or less inherited by
pine as the message composer.

> But there's a plethora of text editors out there.  Probably some of 
> them are both unencumbered with license problems and better 
> than pico.

That is a good point, I'm just a big fan of pico :) It feels light and
already has most of the features I would be needing from a UI standpoint.
The basic editor functions are always visible on the screen, making it
easier to learn. It has paragraph justification as well, and I don't have
to reimplement everything. But if you have a suggestion of another text
editor to use as a starting point, please let me know. I'm familiar with
vi, emacs, and pico, and haven't used many others like joe, jed... and
obviously vi and emacs are not good choices for this project ;)

Let me throw in a disclaimer: I am not planning on writing yate - yet
another text editor :) The target is a lightweight and simple word
processor with a limited but functional feature set, which I outlined in a
previous message. As such, some functions (like justification) would
occur automatically with the paragraphs, as opposed to being a text editor
where formatting in this style is not automatic.

> If you combined a somewhat-modified text editor with some printing 
> system (like TeX, though again there are a number of options) it 
> could be, more or less, a word processor.  But you can't have 
> typewriter-like output in a word processor anymore.  There's 
> something weird about it nowdays.

I'm a bit wary of using anything too complex right now :) I figured for
simplicity sake I'd save to a more-or-less HTML format, using <b>, <i>,
<p> tags, etc for now. That way it might actually view in a browser
straight :P I thought that would be nice though I'm not thinking of using
this as an HTML editor. I'm thinking *simple*... :) And *simple* includes
not worrying about proportional fonts until I actually have something to
show for my (currently no) work :)

> Word for DOS actually had, IMHO, a quite nice text-based 
> interface.  But I could never get it to print proportional fonts.  

I have never played with Word for DOS much, but I have seen it. Any
particular insights you would have?

Remember: simple. Too many features and I won't get around to implementing
anything :)

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       Engineering and Computer Science Support x2997
                           "Two, Four, Six, Eight - SMP is really great!"