Re: An 'ae' testimony

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Sat, May 22, 1999 at 04:18:45PM -0700, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Sat, May 22, 1999 at 05:34:58PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > > ae barely even WORKS!  It's crap in "vi mode", it's crap in every other
> > > mode, it's just crap!  =>  I'd have to say that _PICO_ is a more
> > > functional editor than ae, at least it works.
> > 
> > Isn't PICO non-free? (similar to pine). Slap me if I am wrong here.
> 
> Yes, but it is the standard newbie editor.

it's not debian's standard newbie editor and can't be because it's
non-free.

end of story. pico is out of the picture.

if you like pico then write a free clone.


> I think a growing segment of people agree that ee should replace ae

2, so far. maybe more. nowhere near as many as those who want vi in some
form on the boot disks (which is why we have ae's vi emulation mode
now...and we'd have elvis-tiny too if we hadn't had to switch to slang).

> for the base disks.  I'm guessing slcurses would be used for that, and
> I think there is some slight bit of porting involved for that.  I'd be
> interested to know how much there is if anything, I'd be interested
> in building mp3blaster and joe against slang. curses sometimes has
> annoying bugs.

ae does the job of a simple no-frills editor in ~20K. ee does it in
~50k (*)

ae wins.

that extra 30k (if it is actually available on the rescue disk) would be
better used either as part of the space needed by elvis-tiny (**) or by
a second copy of ae hacked to remove the non-modalness which dale said
were what is causing the problems with the vi emulation.

if the second copy didn't have to carry the baggage of supporting a
non-modal mode :-) , it may be possible to get the vi emulation to a
decent state. it *almost* works now, which is what is so annoying about
it.


(*) ee requires ncurses now...but i'm assuming it can be ported to
slang's slcurses.h if somebody is motivated enough to do it.

(**) elvis-tiny needs ncurses now. again, i'm assuming it can be ported
to slang using slcurses.h. i made a start on this yesterday and cleared
up a few dozen trivial problems (elvis' own curses.h redefines many
slcurses.h macros) but ran into a problem with elvis' qfaddch macro
which requires more knowledge about curses than i currently have.


craig

--
craig sanders