From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200206111736.SAA20134@cthulhu.dircon.co.uk> Subject: Re: [9fans] Emacs In-Reply-To: from Blake McBride at "Jun 11, 2002 03:27:24 pm" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Digby Tarvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 18:36:46 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a9a4048a-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Unfortunately, as you have discovered, porting of certain 'legacy' applications to Plan9 (EMACS and X spring to mind) is more a religious than a technical issue. Indeed, on this list Plan9 is closer to a religion that a tool - and being a research system, I think a certain idealism on the part of the developers is justified. I have used ed, vi and emacs to roughly the same extent over the years, and spent a bit of time learning sam and acme, neither of which I have had an opportunity to really use except in my spare time, but I have learned them well enough to be happy to use them for serious editing and development if I had to. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and I often switch between emacs and vi in a single editing session if something I want to do is more easily done in the other editor. If I had to characterise them briefly, I would say Ed was a very nice, consistent regular expression based line editor. vi is a bit of a schizophrenic combination of ed with a screen editor sam is a more consistent extension of ed to screen editing and WIMP emacs is a powerful but not easy to learn programmable keyboard based screen editor acme is emacs like, in the sense of attempting to be an all encompassing development environment, but better integrated with (but limited to) a WIMP environment. I think the Plan9 offerings are elegant and powerful, but would still like to have emacs or vi on the system for two reasons 1. For a beginner, it is extremely frustrating trying to explore and configure a system with an unfamiliar editor. When I first installed Plan9 (2nd Ed) I found myself initially exporting a file system from Unix so that I could go back to a Unix terminal when ever I needed to edit a file. I taught myself to use SAM later, using a Unix resident version. 2. There are times when a bitmapped display and a three button mouse are not available, and it would be nice to have a fall back for use in these circumstances. For instance, when using my laptop on a plane, I am stuck with the internal two-button pointing device, and this seriously limits the usability of acme. I also think it would be a better advertisement for the new editors if people adopted them voluntarily, rather than because nothing else is available. But I suppose there is a fear some wouldn't bother learning the new editors if a familiar one was available. Regardless of technical merits, the most powerful editor, as with operating systems, will always be the one you are most familiar with. It takes time and effort to reach a point where you can make a fair comparison with a new one. All editors have their uses. There are times when ed is still my editor of choice - for instance when I am telneting into a system in Australia and getting equivalent to about 300 baud, with about 10 seconds between hitting a key and seeing the character echoed. Microemacs is very useful because it runs on the most diverse selection of operating. I wouldn't expect or ask the Plan9 developers to spend time on such ports, but if someone else decided to port emacs, I would certainly put a copy on my system. Regards, DigbyT > Thank you all very much for all your input. I was > able to adjust my monitor settings which made > looking at things a lot easier. > > Although I received specific instructions on how to find > plan9.ini (thank you!), I already figured it out on my own last night. > While figuring it out I learned more about Plan 9 and had > a lot of fun. I enjoy working with the system. > > I appreciate all your input regarding acme and sam. You > have convinced me to re-look at them with an open mind. > > Instead of immediately starting on my big project, I have decided > to embark on a much smaller project using Plan 9. > > Thanks again for all the help and encouragement. > > Blake McBride > -- Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt@acm.org http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk