16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
8:37 a.m.
On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:05:24 +1000 George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
The "block copy in an editor" thing is
something which has intrigued
me for years. poor old ed/ex/vi just couldn't do it, and for the life
of me, I could not understand why this was "deprecated" by the people
writing that family of editors. I seem to recall the various
lightweight emacs which proceeded GNU had it, in some cases, and GNU
had it. (Goslings emacs?)
I think this is because vi grew out of ex which grew out of
ed, all of which were "line" editors, while the Rand Editor
(and the original NED) assumed a quarter plane model. e had
commands such as box (to draw a box), blank (or was it cut?)
to wipe out all nonblank chars from a rectangle, replace,
overlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer overwrote data),
underlay (nonblank chars from the copy buffer didn't overwrite
nonblank chars) and so on. It even had justfy, fill and center
commands. It was basically an editor for producing documents
in monspaced fonts!