On Sun, May 23, 1999 at 09:47:33AM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > > 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.
Please aquire a clue. I even said two messages up in this thread that
pico was totally unsuitable for the base disks. It's 360k last I looked,
and it's non-free.
Debian has not had an officially recommended newbie editor. However I've
been hearing more and more people suggesting ee for this because it's
much more functional than pico and almost 1/8th the size!
> > 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).
Yes, MAYBE more. I've counted at least 4, plus more on irc. Given that
there have been at most 8 people involved in this thread, I think we seem
to be approaching the point at which you can no longer ignore those of us
who think ee is a good choice.
Well, you may choose to ignore us, but I hope others will not as
willfully ignorant of what's been said. And before you answer that, I
will point out that your comments above about me and pico ARE willfully
ignorant.
> > 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.
Do the math. I did. On the base disks there are ae, a little sh script
for making ae act like vi, and a pair of ~4k rc files. Adding those up
ee is only 17k bigger than ae is. Granted, you lose the vi mode this
way, but the vi mode doesn't work anyway. Of course, that's raw
filesizes.. That doesn't really matter much because we have to talk
inodes here, not raw sizes.
du says:
49 /usr/bin/ee
25 /bin/ae
1 /bin/ae.vi.sh
4 /etc/ae/ae2vi.rc
4 /etc/ae.rc
Seems that du thinks the difference is 15k.
If you can find a vi that will fit in the difference ..... ;>
> (*) 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.
At least someone else has said this is not difficult. It didn't just
build when I tried it, so there's probably at least a couple of things I
would need to do. Of course, it includes a new_curse.[hc] which I told
it not to use when I tried to build it. Looks straight forward enough,
but I'll need to spend a good 20 minutes tinkering with it.
If it settles this thread faster, I'll do so. Otherwise I won't put any
rush on it, I was planning to make other mods as well. I started all
this last night when I tried ee and realized it might be a nice general
purpose editor with some changes---and if I could get rid of the curses
dependency.
Of course this evening I discovered zed. It doesn't use curses or slang,
it uses its own hardcoded stuff. Of course it's 170k or so, not suitable
for a boot disk. BUT OTOH it's almost identical to qedit!! I have
missed qedit so much that provided I can get it to behave sanely inside
screen, joe is going byebye.
> (**) 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.
agh. I don't see why you're so insistant that there be a vi on the boot
disk. My complaint with ae is that it's broken. If it weren't broken,
I'd say leave it be. OTOH ee is not broken and it's a whole 15k bigger.
If it can be built with slcurses, PLEASE replace ae with it.
I've confirmed that FreeBSD doesn't ship with a vi on their disk, they
use ee. Why ee and not ae? ee works. why not elvis-tiny? Too big.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gold, n.:
A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined
deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately
bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done
anything to them.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
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