If you could have anything in vi ...

[Chris Calabrese]

In <1991Mar18.195343.665 at cs.widener.edu> brendan at cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) writes:
> I'm working on a "free" version of vi. It's to fully emulate the
>current Berkeley-derived versions. After that, it's prettymuch a
>free-for-all.
> So .. what would you have added to vi, if you could? What would you
>have made an option? What would you change?

Well, first off, I'm not quite sure that the world needs another vi
clone.  We already have stevie and elvis.  Maybe the author should
think about modifying one of these for their new features.

That said, here's my wish list (some of these might already have been
done in other implementations, but are not in standard vi from BSD or
sV):

1) Unlimited line length
2) ksh like history editing - we've hacked up the vi we have around
   here to do this and it's really great.  You can edit the : and / lines with
   all the regular vi editing commands, plus go forward and back through
   the : and / history file (j and k) and search the history (/ and ?).
3) better multi-file support - remember marks accross files, maybe
   even multi windows
4) X windows support - this has been done inside of Bell Labs, and had
   been done here for the Apollos a long time ago, but in both cases, it
   was done with an outboard program that sends the appropriate keystrokes
   to vi when you do things with the mouse

Also, I think the idea of having simple formatting inside of vi is
bogus.  Vi is an editor, not a word processor.  Besides, you can
already get the desired effect using fmt.  Let's not turn vi into
emacs with moded editing.

Name:			Christopher J. Calabrese
Brain loaned to:	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
att!ulysses!cjc		cjc at ulysses.att.com
Obligatory Quote:	``pher - gr. vb. to schlep.  phospher - to schlep light.philosopher - to schlep thoughts.''