Re: This is a simple question

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> I keep hearing how wonderful EMACS is. My experience with it on various Unix
> systems doesn't seem to impress me with its overall wonderfulness. I keep
> thinking it must be hiding its lamp under a bushel basket. I tried to
> download and run a version of it on WinNT/PC. It wouldn't compile and I
> didn't have time or incentive to want to mess with it. Maybe its lamp is
> under a bushel basket that is burried in a cave somewhere? :-)


I have been an avid EMACS user since the 80's. IMHO the GNU-Emacs does not
do EMACS justice. On the Prime 50 Series, EMACS was written in a subset
of PL/I (as much of Prime's software was), and in my mind at least, they
had the best implementation of EMACS on the planet. Too bad that GNU-Emacs
was not inspired more from it.

GNU-Emacs could be vastly improved by make one single change:
that is, support the ^C function that Prime's EMACS provided. ^C was
a "repeat last function" binding. It would repeat the last keystroke,
last macro, or last "whatever was done". When set up this way, you
could do something like "execute macro" once, and then just ^C as often
as required to repeat the function a few more times (there are better
ways to repeat hundreds+ of times however).  If you've never used this,
you don't know what a convenience you are missing (which is why I don't
use GNU-Emacs). I never had the time myself to investigate the effort
that would be needed to fit this feature into GNU-Emacs.

[BTW, if someone knows that this feature exists in GNU-Emacs, then all
that I would need is to re-bind the keys to my own tastes. However, AFAIK,
this capability is absent in GNU-Emacs, and probably requires considerable
effort to track the "last whatever was done" in order to repeat it upon
demand Note this also gets into how to handle getting user input and
how to handle cut and paste from the kill buffer]

What I have used is a heavily customized version of Micro-EMACS (with
some bugs added in ;-) ). I have a few Ada customized "scripts", but
nothing along the lines of what you are looking for.  I keep thinking
about doing a Micro-EMACS rewrite in Ada.. but time is not my friend
these days. The good thing about this old Micro-EMACS thing is that it
compiles just about anywhere, and fits one one 3.5" diskette.


> Quite possibly EMACS is the ultimate solution. However, AFAIK, there isn't
> some sort of Ada-ized version of it available as a .exe for WinNT that can
> be simply downloaded, install-shielded and executed. 


Yes, sadly true  :-(  AFAIK

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg