Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 00:12:23 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: The Classiest Man Alive <ksmm@cybercom.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATTN Emacs users; new Zile release Message-ID: <12456.874048343@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Sep 1997 21:31:46 EDT." <3.0.3.32.19970911213146.009c5680@cybercom.net>
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> Perhaps more to the point, no one has actually commented on the new version > of Zile. I know how resistant programmers can be to change something as > sacred as an editor, but I don't think a quick evaluation/test of the new > editor would kill anybody. Well, OK, I just looked at it and I guess I have some comments: 1. If it wants to go in as a substitute for ee, it'll have to be bmake'd and proven friendly with /usr/obj first. No configure scripts outside the ports collection for us. :-) 2. It should display the keymap in a separate window by default since seeing "M-h M-h for help" is going to confuse the piss out of the truly naive user. I can just see them typing "M-dash-h M-dash-h" as individual keys, or something, and being most confused. The confusing nature of emacs and vi to the complete newbie is why ee was brought in to begin with. 3. It should do the right thing with the real meta key. When I tried using it, I just got "\37777777750" in my buffer when I typed "Alt-D" to get "latest info" information. This will confuse the emacs users who expect an emacs-compatible editor to be, well, compatible! :) 4. Another nice thing about ee is that it requires *no* help files or other existing datafiles. I just link ee into the crunched binary and voila, one stand-alone editor ready to run. If zile is to truly replace ee, it will have to have an option for building it entirely self contained so that I don't have to sweat the contents of /usr/share (which generally doesn't even exist yet when most users invoke ee during the install). All in all, zile looks quite nice but I think it has a ways to go before we can realistically start talking about it as a substitute for ee. Jordan
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