GUI Editor?

[Peter Bagnall]

Discussions about editors always run for years, but never mind!

emacs is built on a LISP interpreter, it would be possible, although I 
don't know if it's been done, to write an extension that does exactly 
what you're suggesting. The concept of macro's is core to emacs.

You might want to do a search to see if some bright spark has already 
written it. Of course the fact it's LISP restricts the number of people 
who want to write extensions but there are a scary number already out 
there.

Emacs does already do some similar things, for example when you type } 
it moves the cursor up to the { and back again, just to give a quick 
visual hint as to which brace you're closing (assuming you're in C or 
Java mode), and the performance of this is excellent, so if you chose 
to write your own I would imagine it would perform ok.

This is the point where it's traditional for emacs users to tell people 
that what they should really do is learn LISP, which would be a grand 
thing to say, but I'd be a complete hypocrite if I did, so I wont (I'll 
just imply it!).

But off the shelf emacs doesn't do this to the best of my knowledge, 
which means I don't think you can just switch on this feature, you 
would have to write it yourself.

Pete

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 04:25 PM, Riley Berton wrote:

> Editors that run under X are generally very good.  However, I have 
> always had one gripe:  the lack of useful macro expansion.  On all 
> editors that I have looked at (and they are numerous) I have yet to 
> see "space bar" expansion of macros so that the usage of macros is 
> easier than just typing out the contents of the macro.  For instance, 
> if I wanted to produce this:
>
> if ( <cursor should end up here> ) {
>
> }
>
> and wanted to use a macro to do it, I would need to bind that sequence 
> to some weird (usually unconfigurable) key combination, making it just 
> as much as a PITA as typing it in the first place.
>
> Ideally, an editor should be able to figure out what I mean based on a 
> few user preset macros and the "space bar" would expand the macro, so 
> that typing:
>
> if<space>
>
> would result in my example above.  I have been searching for this 
> feature for quite some time in many editors.
>
> I currently use NEdit and was able to write a macro for that editor 
> that used the space bar as it's key, however, it ran very slowly and 
> made the editor less responsive so I had to turn it off.
>
> Does anyone out there know of an 'X' based editor that does what I 
> outlined?
>
> riley
>
> On Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:14:32 -0500 (EST)
> Christopher Murtagh <chris@music.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Drew Lane wrote:
>>> I'm really looking for a non console text editor that will run under 
>>> X
>>> and KDE.
>>
>> Gvim, Xemacs, Bluefish, Kate... all of these are GUI type editors 
>> that run
>> under X. My preference is Gvim, but unlike some people's my choice 
>> isn't a
>> religious one. A while back, I had to learn a common *nix editor and 
>> only
>> had the time/brainpower to learn one. I chose vi because it is 
>> installed
>> on just about *every* unix out there. I do know a lot of people who 
>> use
>> emacs and love it just as much, so I would suggest learning either of
>> these two.
>>
>>  I go so used to vi/vim/Gvim, that I can't use BBEdit anymore in 
>> MacOS (I
>> keep on getting extra 'dd's 'i's and ':w' peppered everywhere) and I 
>> now
>> use Gvim in MacOS X (but I rarely use MacOS X). I used to think that
>> BBEdit was the one killer app that would be impossible to replace on 
>> any
>> other OS. Guess I was wrong on that one.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> Note: vi is the old original editor, vim is Vi iMproved, and Gvim is
>> Graphical Vim.
>>
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