Re: SEUL: Text editors.

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

> How many SEUs know that '^' means Ctrl ? ... I didn't when I first tried 
> pico.  now that I know this and went back ( a few minutes ago ) it made 
> sence.

I did. It's fairly standard notation. 
How many SEUs know that you need to
press Alt <key> to activate a pulldown-menu ? 

A subtle modification like  'ctrl-h = help'  would be a good way to
make sure
no-one was lost. Then in the help menu under ee they see a list of
"Control keys" , and lots of ^ bindings. 

Jed's help menu actually does this BTW.

of course, pico can't be modified (restrictive license) but ee can. The ee
license looks pretty GNU-like (at a superficial glance)

the other option still is to look at jed which is very easy to tweak
(since the keybindings are in config files) 
also, I've just been playing with it , and discovered you can get it to
display the help menu when you fire it up (much like the way pico works).
The other thing you'd want to do is this: the syntax is jed fliename. The
program doesn't want to create a scratch buffer if you don't pass it an
argument. Easy enough to fix though (even I could fix this...)


The idea of throwing a nice setup on top of  jed is worth thinking of
because it appears very customisable.

The other text editors had big problems. ted was very ugly. Scary. JE and
jered seemed a little broken (?) I had them lock up on me a few times.
They have these "end of buffer marks" like vi and for some reason, it let
me enter text past the end of the buffer and then the editor got confused
and crashed.

The advantage of ee, pico and jed is they are all widely distributed and
well tested. The advantage of pico is it's the nicest to use, but also, it
can't be tweaked even a little bit. ee is like pico but lacks reasonable
cut&paste. 

Jed is so configurable that perhaps working on tweaking jed is
a worthwhile project. A set of nice config files for jed might just do it.


>  I have seen progs with multiple keybindings 
> and they work fine.  i.e... pico ( the 1 you all like ) uses '^V' and

Possibly. Depends on what the multiple key bindings are. 


-- Donovan