Aaron Sloman wrote:
>[snip]
>
>
>>No syntax colorizing has to be the top one, but also there is no code
>>folding,
>
>
> Providing syntax highlighting is not something a student has ever asked
> me for previously, though I noticed that Brian Logan set that up in his
> emacs environment for Xved.
>
It is a very useful feature for those trained to use it. It provides the
ability to immediately (as-you-type) knowing you whether what you typed
is a proper statement or a misspelling of one. Lets you easily make a
mental-catalogue (for lack of a better word) of the buffer into blocks,
like comment-block and code-block, and further down the line into
procedure/import/variable/declaration-block.
but this, as has been pointed out, depends on the way the person learned
to edit his/her code.
> [snip]
> My view is that we should not try to alter ved to do this, as it would
> be far too much work (unless Jonathan Cunningham's Ved-in-rclib ever
> takes off!). Instead we should make it easier for people to access
> poplog from their preferred editor, as in David's case.
The thing I would suggest is to make a clearly defined interface to
'link' ved. At the moment my efforts concentrate on running a native
compiler process (to be expected) and sending and receiving information
from the input/output streams. This is very inconvenient and certainly
not very robust. A native java implementation of the compiler would, in
my case, be the ideal solution, bu I do not expect (or hope for) this to
happen.
>
> Occasionally folding is requested, and several of us have, at times,
> make plans for a folded Ved, but getting the requirements right
> is tricky (as Steve comments).
I would suggest looking at how JEdit does it. It has a very good folding
architecture and if it can be done in Java it can also be done in pop11.
By now I must sound like a JEdit preacher... I'm not preaching, I just
want to stay clearly on track of what I'm working on, and it has been my
coding editor of choice for (nearly) ever. Quite appart from that the
source is avaliable to hack into, which is nice :)
>[snip]
>>the focus model of the WM
>>is overriden,
>
>
> Ved does nothing about window focus: it's all up to the window manager.
> Within a window if you have two ved buffers open you have to select
> one into which you type. (E.g. using ESC x)
>
One persons bug is another's feature... the 'problem' I refer to more
specifically (happens only in xved and might well be 'cured' with the
'[] -> vedwarpcontext;' snippet), is that, if you have multiple xved
buffers open, when you type, it doesn't matter what buffer is in the WM
foreground, the text will go to the buffer where the mouse is. So it
happens to me often that I open a teach/ref/help file and a code buffer,
then move the mouse out of the way and before I know it I'm typing into
the ref file because the pointer happened to fall there.
Quite appart from that I don't see why Xved or any other program should
override the window handling. That is the very reson why WMs are there
in the first place.
>
> See REF vedwarpcontext.
>
[OT: Speaking about REF, is there a file that describes its syntax? I
have been looking into ref-file dumps and they are littered with
non-standard 0x11, 0x13, 0x14 and other control characters, presumably
to control the colouring]
>[snip]
>
>>no tab-editing (for multiple buffers, i.e. you need different windows
>>for each) and some other pithy complaints. Most of that is also true of
>>vi, but at least the key-bindings are more straight forward.
>
>
> When mozilla introduced tabs I thought I would use them a lot. I know
> some people find them very useful.
>
> In fact it turned out that I don't like them: I'd rather start a new
> window which I can iconise or not, or change its size or location.
>
When I started with Opera, the tabs were inmensely annoying and gave up
soon afterwards, but later 'rediscovered' tabbed browsing in mozilla and
was won over by it. However, tabbed browsing and tabbed editing are very
different, at least in my experience, so you might even like such a
feature...
> Then I have the option of having two visible at once, which tabs don't
> allow.
There is a split-pane option in many editors, jedit included, which
essentailly splits the text editing real estate and lets you edit/view
two or more files at the same time.
>[snip]
>
>
>>also by making it a jedit plugin poplog gets access to all of the other
>>jedit plugins (or should it be the other way around?)
>
>
> I am sure this will be very valuable.
>
> I am not actually saying that your complaints about Ved have no basis,
> rather that you need to be clear about the difference between claims
> about what *you* don't like and claims about what nobody would like.
I am speaking as a fresher comming from a Windows (in my case Linux, but
windows for most) environment and finding myself surrounded in a
completely alien environment with an editor that behaves nothing as the
stuff i'm used to. From what I have heard from first year students this
attitude towards the editor is common.
I have to admit, tho, that I never liked it and am probably biased
against it. Every time I tried to use it I felt as if I were fighting it
and in the end I reduced it to a documentation browser, using instead
JEdit with my colouring mode (first from my computer using ssh, then
from the labs after it was installed) to edit *.p files. The next stage
is the compiler integration and finally the documantation browsing to
complete the job.
>
> Editors are notoriously a matter of taste and arguing about which is
> best, or better, is generally pointless, except where one is a subset of
> another.
>
true.
> [snip]
>
>
>>PS: I have a (almost) complete standalone version of the java-bound
>>poplog incremental compiler. Will put in my website when its ready. The
>>jedit plugin extensions will take a bit longer...
>
>
> Many thanks for putting in this effort.
>
I'm just building the tools I need into my editor, nothing to thank me
for...
dave.
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