john@josquin.ucdavis.edu writes:
>For the life of me, I can't figure out how to use
<enter> g
>to move through the help system. When I type <enter> I insert a line
>feed in the help file. Any help for the brain dead?
The <enter> key is not to be confused with the <return> key - it is usually
at the bottom right of workstation keyboards. I can't remember where it was
on my laptop (which is not here with me), or even if it existed. The emacs
emulations for VED (lib emacs, lib vedemacs ) provide <esc> x as an
alternative to <enter>. If you do have an <enter> key it is possible it is
bound to <return> in .Xdefaults.
You can put
lib vedemacs
in your vedinit.p file to get a measure of emacs emulation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) There is a collection of .el files that Gordon Dakin wrote some time
ago to handle the multi-language aspect of Poplog. I will put them on the
N.American Poplog ftp site when I get it established. Emacs, by default,
believes that it is speaking to a single-language system.
However he never customised Emacs to deal with the help system. This could
be done by having Emacs access the POP-11 variable -vedhelplist-. E.g. from
within prolog.el, one would have to send:
pop11
vedhelplist =>
prolog
(2) I am in the process of instructing 40 students using an implementation
of Scheme that I wrote to run under Poplog. I use the emacs emulation mode
lib vedemacs
with a few extra key-bindings.in A few observations about the naive user
exposed to VED for the first time follow:
(a) VED by default binds the cursor keys to move to the top and bottom,
left and right of a -page-. This is AWFUL for first time users, who don't
know about control-f etc. not having met emacs, and who don't think of
using the keypad for this purpose. Strange to say, not all students pay
100% attention to what I say in class.... For UMASS Scheme, I have rebound
the cursor keys to move a single character at a time. This, together with
menus tailored for the class (e.g. with class notes on-line and containing
executable Scheme text in the best Poplog tradition) has proved workable.
(b) The emacs emulation works quite well for those without a built-in
commitment to the real thing. However one inconsistency that annoys people
is that successive ctrl-K commands in emacs emacs result in all the deleted
lines being stored in the buffer, whence they can be retrieved by ctrl-Y,
whereas they are lost in the vedemacs.
(c) Personally, I find the fact that ctrl-W is adjacent to ctrl-E is an
awful feature of EMACS, since if I get it wrong, a whole chunk of text is
gobbled up.
(d) I wish there was a better mailer for VED. One really needs to have
one's messages summarised as single lines. I have hesitated to put in
a "send message to the professor" feature, but think I will next semester,
and hope not to be buried in a deluge (they ought to know how to do that
anyway).
(3) The command:
print -o ps
(which outputs a file with snazzy characters for drawing etc.)
does not work for North American paper. I had to get in and hack it.
--------------------------------------------------
On the relative merits of VED and EMACS I have the following observations:
(1) The design of EMACS is more logical, since it has (fairly)
faithfully preserved many of the functional features of LISP. Emacs
commands are functions (or at least procedures with parameters) whereas VED
has the 'orrid -vedargument- hack. Emacs achieves this by associating
descriptors with functions which specify how they are to be used as
commands. This is the sort of thing we put pdprops into POP-2 for.....
One can use the ved_... commands in a more functional style by doing:
define vedcall(a,f);
f(a->vedargument);
enddefine;
(2) VED works fine as an in-process editor for most POPLOG code-development
applications. Where it breaks down is in supporting the development and
incorporation of the bad-mannered code generated by the C-language.
Frequent, automatic saves should be the norm for this, or alternatively,
running VED as a separate process.
(3) I make extensive use of the ved_draw facility which works adequately
for generating boxes-and-arrows diagrams for class notes. This together
with lib vedblocks is a handy way of developing this material.
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