Re: [TUHS] screen editors

Clem Cole writes: OK, ok, the point that it's not 100% compatible wins the day. Couple more points and then it's time to move on. While I spend a lot of time railing against bad programming, the fact that vim is huge doesn't bother me too much because my machine has more memory that the machine on which I started using vi had disk. And just because it still blows my mind, my machine (on just one of the drives) has more disk than was available in the world when I started using vi. Good chance that my CPU has more cache memory than the PDP-11/70 on which I started using vi had main memory. So the size doesn't matter too much for me. One of the reasons that I chose vi over emacs was architectural. At a certain level, vi was a text editor and emacs was an operating system, and since I was running UNIX and was a UNIX philosophy person I just didn't want to be running an operating system on top of an operating system just to do text editing. It's for that reason that I hate the addition of multiple windows to vi. I already have a windowing system on my machine, and that's what I use for windows. To me, the correct thing to do is to open a new desktop window to edit a new file and start a new instance of vi, not to use vi to open another internal window. I guess that what I'm saying is that I think that rather than following the UNIX philosophy of having distinct tools and composing, much modern software tries to do too much stuff that's not unique to its domain. A strained analogy would be if every "little language" felt that it had to re-implement a big language too. Jon