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- From: pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu (Tom Pollard)
- Subject: Re: good vi editor for the mac
- Message-ID: <1992Sep8.210501.2783@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu>
- Organization: Center for Biomolecular Simulation
- References: <1992Sep4.192444.24921@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu> <1992Sep5.221526.10841@uc.msc.edu> <Bu94Kw.4Mz@csn.org>
- Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 21:05:01 GMT
- Lines: 69
-
- bell@teal.csn.org (Bell Scott) writes:
-
- >pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu (Tom Pollard) writes:
- >> somebody (?) writes:
- >> >I want a good vi . . . for the mac.
- >>
- >> ................................. There are a lot of things that are much
- >> easier to do in a good mainframe editor, like vi and especially emacs, than
- >> in a standard Mac 'word processor'.
- >
- >
- > To Tom: Just what can't you do in MSWord 5.0 that you can do in emacs?
- >
- Ok. First, I haven't seen MSWord 5.0 yet, and I am not a regular emacs user.
- But, the sorts of things that I find that I can do easily in 'vi' that are
- unavailable in 'word processors' (which I differentiate from 'text editors'
- like Alpha) include:
-
- 1) Global or incremental search-and-replace using regular expressions. (I
- understand Nisus supports this, however).
-
- 2) 'Global' search-and-replace over limited regions of the document; in 'vi'
- you can specify the regions by their absolute or relative (to the cursor)
- line numbers.
-
- 3) Copy-and-paste using multiple named buffers. (Most Mac apps support just
- the single clipboard)
-
- 4) Unlimited undo. Emacs supports this, I think; Alpha supports it completely.
- Vi saves the last 10 (?) strings that you deleted in named buffers so that
- you can often undo a handful of multiple deletions, when neccesary.
-
- 5) Keyboard macros, i.e., assigning commonly used command sequences to a
- single keystroke. (I suppose you can recover this functionality on a Mac
- by buying a package like Quick Keys (sp?).)
-
- Vi always lets you redo the last command that modified text by hitting a
- single key. This is often very convenient.
-
- 6) Multiple named 'marks'. While editing a file, you can set marks at
- important points throughout the file and jump to any mark with two
- keystrokes. This is very useful when you're editting programs, or reading
- a large file.
-
- Does MSWord now support any of these features in 5.0? The features that I
- particularly depend on are regular expression searches and keyboard macros,
- and this is why I keep Alpha around. Also, it's nice to be able to work
- with a text document directly without wasting the time to convert to
- some word processor's document format (and back to TEXT format afterwards).
-
- Finally, emacs (and Alpha) are completely extensible, since the provide an
- underlying language in which you can add new functionality to the program.
- If there's something that Word doesn't do that you decide you need, you're
- stuck. In emacs and Alpha you can often just implement it yourself.
-
- Are there any more hard-core emacs (or vi) users out there who can give Scott
- a more complete answer?
-
- Tom
-
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Tom Pollard Department of Chemistry
- pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu Columbia University
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- --
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Tom Pollard Department of Chemistry
- pollard@cucbs.chem.columbia.edu Columbia University
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-