Set User (aka su)

[Walter Smith wrs@newton.apple.com]

>As a side note... has anyone on the Plan 9 list ever used the
>Macintosh MPW shell?  It is a Unix-like shell combined with a
>programmer's text editor. You could select any text at any location in
>any editing window, hit Enter, and send it off as a command.  Or
>conversely edit any command with the full power of the text editor.
>This gave you many of the features of the 8 1/2 terminal and Acme...

Yes, I use it all the time.  I've never understood why this style didn't
migrate to Unix/Emacs/etc. systems...seems like there's always some
complicated mechanism of copying things to the input line in the shell
window or some such thing, instead of just executing the stuff in place.
Smalltalk-80 had this years ago, of course.

Another little-appreciated feature of MPW is that while a file is open in
the editor, the contents of the window _are_ the contents of the file (of
course, the file is really still there if you close the window without
saving).  Unlike Emacs, you don't have to save and load between the edit
buffers and the disk all the time.  If you redirect output to a file that's
open in the editor, the output spits out into the edit window.  It's also
handy to use a scratch window as an input file.  Seems like this would be
an easy namespace manipulation in Acme (of course, maybe it already works
this way...pardon me if I'm preaching to the choir).

- W

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Walter Smith                            Internet: wrs@apple.com
Newton Software                         AppleLink: WALTER.SMITH
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