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Date:Mon Sep 10 13:23:54 1993 
Subject:Re: emacs & ved; flame-bait. 
From:Andy Holyer 
Volume-ID:930910.04 

A.Sloman (A.Sloman@uk.ac.bham.cs) wrote:
: Hello Andy,
....
Regexps: OK, I've never tried Jon's package. I should, I admit. I also
accept Aaaron's point that Regexps  are a really early-70's idea which
I should have nothing to do  with, it's just  that I've got so used to
the idea of being able to replace

my_func( arg1, arg2, arg3)

with 

my_new_func( arg1, arg3, some_constant, arg2)

all the way through a file with essentially  one editor command that I
miss it, that's all.

: > Oh, and  *why*, except for implementation reason,   does  ved hae this
: > fetish for line-orientation?

: What does that mean? You want vertical lines of text as well as
: horizontal ones, or what?

OK, what I meant was this: (This is  yet again one  of those "personal
taste" issues: Which side of the  line an individual  is on is totally
arbitrary, I  agree). It's an implementation  detail that a ved buffer
consists of a vector of strings. This design  decision has resulted in
a number of places in the "natural unit of working"  for ved  to  be a
line. This is OK  as far as it goes,  but is arbitrary.  As in so many
other places, Emacs just happened to jump the other way.

The notable   place  where    this    occurs  is in    the   differing
implementations of "The Region". In ved,  this consists of one or more
lines, with the boundary placed on the line boundary. In Emacs this is
not  the case:  Both  the  mark and the point   are considered to  lie
between   two ajacent   characters, and  thus The  Region  can  be any
arbitrary sequence of  characters. (One can also do  region operations
on rectangles, too, but IMHO that's just a bit *too* esoteric).

It's all  down to taste, I admit,  but  in  ved  the standard  unit of
editing data is the line (which is made up  of characters, of course),
whereas Emacs just  does operations   on n  characters. This is   less
important in programming than it is in editing free text, of course.

The place where ved's n-line-region is  really problematic is in xved,
where some operations work on the ved,  line-based region, and some on
the selection (done with a mouse) which  is of course character-based.
I still  have no strong  perception of  which commands  through  which
method do what on which, after months of  using xved.  But this use of
two disjunct selection systoms is *wrong*.

: > And... wait for it... NO UNDO!!! Until you have to  put up with a yank
: > which calls  itself undo you  have no  idea how irritating  it is. But
: > I've had this argument before.....

[Aaron's long and valuable discourse on undo...]

OK, this is why I like Emacs' undo rather than ved's (or vi's for that
matter): As many of you will have noticed,  I'm rather a sloppy typist
who depends on  the power of my editor  to make up for the  occasional
uncertainties of my typing.  I  don't think I'm  unique :-). One of my
little foibles is that quite often I'll hit a key  twice when I wanted
to hit it once (especially if it's an uncommonly-hit key). 

The case I find most irritating, which has  happened to me  in ved too
often for comfort, is that I'll hit F4 and bounce the  key so I delete
two lines at once. In Emacs, there's no problem: just hit ^xu ^xu, and
it undoes  the last two things  you  did... In ved,  you're  done for.
You've lost that line (ignoring stuff like pulling up the  backup file
and editing it in, or retyping the line).

That's what *I* want undo for. To make up for my fallibilities. Emacs'
undo is (usually) sufficient for me. Ved is (usually) not.

Again, I think it  gets down to your expecatations  of what  an editor
will do, and that's probably due to which editors you've learnt and in
which order.

-Andy Holyer

"ed  -> (Prime) "visual  ed"  -> Wordstar -> vi ->   Emacs  -> ved", I
think.
-- 
&ndy Holyer, COGS, University of Sussex, UK. 
Still seeking work, by the way....