Modelessness (Was porting UNIX applications to the mac)

[michaelm at bcsaic.UUCP]

In article <2637 at cbosgd.ATT.COM> mark at cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes:
>...[another article's author's] version of vi (3.7) doesn't show you when
>you're in input mode, but mine (3.10) does; so does the MS DOS PC/VI
>clone.  (It says "INPUT MODE" right there on the bottom line, or "I"
>if you have terse set.  There are similar messages for r and R modes.)
>In System V release 2, you can get this by putting "set showmode"
>in your EXINIT, in release 3 it's on by default.

Well, this is nice (although unavailable to those of us using BSD, I take it);
but I don't generally look down at the 25th. line before typing....
What would be even nicer would be if the cursor would change shape to show
the mode, like many PC editors do (e.g. PCWrite tells you whether you're in
insert or overwrite mode that way).  But I don't suppose most of the terminals
out there support this kind of thing.  Nor do I believe termcap supports it.
Sigh...
-- 
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
	...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm