Re: [dev] Experimental editor

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Peter John Hartman
<peterjohnhartman_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> > A simple editor probably shouldn't have any more keybindings than, say,
>> > surf; in fact one or two less: page up/down, up/right/left/down, and find.
>> > One doesn't need modes for that.  If you want to do something wacked out to
>> > your file (like go to the third word on the 4th sentence and delete every
>> > vowel), that should probably be done *outside* the editor.
>>
>> I've got a long comment queued up (restricted internet situation at
>> work), but just to respond to the comment about moving stuff "outside
>> the editor". One big disadvantage of doing everything "by hand" is
>> that such stuff isn't in an undo history that you can execute. I tend
>> to use undo a certain amount, mostly immediately (which could be
>> simulated by just keeping one copy) but a reasonable amount undoing
>> several sets of changes.
>
> I can't wait.  As to revision control, just use software made to handle
> revision control.  The editor doesn't need to do this.

I'm going to assume that what you mean by "The editor doesn't need to
do this." is "the computer user doesn't benefit from having undo in
the editor rather than a version control"; I'm much less interested in
what _needs_ to be done rather than what is most _beneficial_ to do.
(It's probably obvious from other posts that I don't subscribe to the
common interpretation of the suckless philosophy. IMO, it's
unfortunate that both GNOME/KDE/whatever and suckless developers seem
more interested in doing stuff for reasons based on the underlying
code -- it's cool to do that, it looks good in demos, it's minimal to
do that, etc -- rather than from a consideration of what most
benefical for the user.) I actually use relatively fine-grained
version control as an additional workflow measure (as-i-develop
bisection, etc), but there are some things for which firing up an
existing VC and attempting to revert a minor change is overkill.

The comment I'm talking about isn't specifically about your email but
a general post on the thread; ironically the reason the post is queued
up is because I chose to write it in an effective editor rather than
this crummy gmail edit box, and I can't send arbitrary files through
this work machine.

cheers, dave tweed
Received on Thu Jun 16 2011 - 10:15:44 CEST