Installing gForth on the Raspberry Pi

Emacs is horrible. It's like one of those early 20th century electric tools with no safety features whatsoever, so you couldn't just pick it up and use it, you had to learn how to not electrocute yourself first.

Gordon

I was hoping we could avoid the vi/Emacs wars.

The same could be said for the Unix command line. If you take the time to learn it, vi is enormously powerful, but if you have the attention span of a goldfish then use a desktop editor.

A clone of DOS's EDIT for those who haven't cut the apron strings.

I'll agree with you on that one.

Easily found by putting "editor" in to a package manager search.

---druck

Agreed, and as vi/vim is about the one editor that is virtually guaranteed to installed in every UNIX, Linux or related operating system, its worth learning the basics of using it simply because its almost always there.

In addition its a very useful 'get out of jail free' card because of you can use it on a terminal without cursor keys or in situations when cursor keys are borked. If its in neutral, i.e. not in one of the text entry modes, the keys h,j,k,l act as cursor keys: h - moves one place left l - moves one place right j - moves down a line k - moves up a line

This can get you out of trouble if you're trying to revive a nearly dead system. For instance, you may be reduced to using a 'glass teletype' screen because anything better has ceased to work.

That said, my favourite editor is microEmacs. If its not installed and not available for your distro or OS, you can get the source here:

There's quite a decent manual and, because its fairly easily configured for almost and terminal, all the function keys, etc work on almost any hardware.

Despite its name, its a full featured text editor and uses function keys etc defined by the traditional /etc/termcap file. It is written in C very fast. It is easily configured and compiled for almost any OS on any hardware: the only restrictions are that you must have a C compiler and termcap must be supported on the target system. It can edit many files at once (limit set by system memory) and display any two loaded files for comparison, text copying, etc.

I first met microEmacs on Microware's OS/9 operating system, but have since ported it to at least two flavours of UNIX (on NCR and DEC alpha boxes at $work), and currently use it on my Linux systems (Fedora and RaspberryPi) as well as on OS/9-68000.

Me too, but someone always starts it ...

vi (these days vim) is just a tool I use. It happens to be one I'm very comfortable with using, having used it for about 25 years now.

Gordon

I ported it to a version of minix running on a transputer some 25 years ago. To port it I had to write the whole termcap thing from scratch as there wasn't a public domain one I could find (and we didn't have the internet then) I was also tasked with porting the full-blown emacs, but even back then it wouldn't work on the somewhat limited system we had. (More a minix issue then IIRC)

But to help write termcap I had to port a vi-like editor first, (STeVIe) then use that to test termcap, then that to port microEmacs...

It was all somewhat intersting at the time...

-Gordon

which I think sums it up well. An editor is a tool you have to be comfortable with, since you are using it, not for its own utility, but to handle something else. You want to be able to concentrate on the something else, not to have to keep thinking about the editor.

For this reason most people have a deep affection for the first editor that got really familisr with, and resist atttempts to get them to switch to something else.

In my case the first was ECCE on a VAX. Later EDT, and better the EDT emulation in EVE. A colleague swore by TECO - most others swore AT TECO.

These days StrongED on RISC OS, and Ovation Pro for DTP work, and if I have to use Windows, Notepad++

Been there, done that. A while back I decided I needed a version of Curses for Java - there wasn't anything particularly portable or well enough documented at the time (it used JINI), so I wrote my own and, of course, to make that work in a sane and sensible fashion, I also ended up writing termcap for Java, which my Curses implementation uses for its low- level screen handling. FWIW I went for termcap rather then terminfo because its innards are better defined than terminfo. There are at least two incompatible versions of terminfo out there and ditto for tic: since there's no easily accessible documentation for the tic output file (that I could find, anyway), sticking with termcap seemed like the most sensible option.

I already have microEmacs, which I've been using since about 1992. As it does everything I need, I'm not too keen on using anything else for my everyday editing needs. Besides, its dead easy to port to another OS.

Needless to say, porting it to my RPi was amongst the first things I did when I got one. microEmacs is termcap based: the RPi doesn't support termcap, but there's a nice GNU version at the Free Software Foundation which was trivially easily ported to the RPi. Its only drawback is that it doesn't support tc links between termcap definitions, but a quick hand edit soon fixed my usual /etc/termcap by setting up a monolithic xterm entry. Did the lot, including finding the GNU termcap, in about half an afternoon once I'd fired up the RPi, configured it for headless operation on my LAN and set up CVS on it.

Yes, indeed. All good fun too.

ECCE - The Edinburgh Compatible Context Editor. Looks like it's been re-written in C:

I used it once upon a time on Emas and Mouses..

Not used TECO. No plans to either :)

Gordon

On Sun, 16 Nov 2014 19:50:22 GMT, Alan Adams declaimed the following:

Never encountered ECCE... I used SOS until it was removed from the OS release -- when I had to pick up EDT (and later mapped the Blaise editor of TRS-80 Alcor Pascal to look much like EDT [tricky as the numeric pad only had three function row keys, not four])

Think I encountered TECO on my college OS theory class... as I recall, most commands looked like swearing...

Having to relearn vi(m) -- never got comfortable with (micro)EMACS sequences.

Op Sun, 16 Nov 2014 19:50:22 GMT schreef Alan Adams:

With the NppFTP plugin in Notepad++ one can edit on Windows remote files on the RPi.

AFAICT microEmacs shares a partial name and about nothing else with emacs. Almost all its keyboard actions can be redefined to suit your keyboard by a combination of editing /etc/termcap and/or its config files.

microEmacs doesn't (necessarily) use those complex sequences beloved of emacs. Though it uses them by default, almost all can be reassigned to Fn keys etc. and your chosen sequences can generally be more less painlessly transferred to other hosts.

Back in the days of WfW 3.1 and Win 95 the my preferred Windows editor was PFE, which came from British academia. It was fast, very configurable depending on the file extension, and would load near-infinite numbers of files into cascaded windows. It had capabilities for running compilers etc with the output returned in yet another window. Its main deficiency was its inability to use regular expressions for search and replacement matches.

Ah, control-meta-hyper-alt-...great fun!

I had it available on Coherent (1991 a 16 bit Unix clone). I use its manual to this day. So I have a micro emacs manual in print. Maybe give it a try.

In 1985 one of my collegues Edwin disapproved of both vi and emacs. Subsequently he wrote an editor that removed the disadvantage of both. I'm using it right now. Works on linux,windows and I have the source.

Groetjes Albert

That's neat. I will play with that.

FWIW, I'm using the Martin Whittaker version of microEmacs V4.00, though I admit I couldn't tell you how that differs from vanilla me v4.0

Has anybody used microEmacs v5? I see the beta is available from the aquest website as ports to several OSen..

MicroEmacs is a program I didn't realize was still around. I use ZILE sometimes on small VPS's, but really, a Raspberry Pi is plenty powerful enough to run Emacs.

Bah, Zap and Impression Publisher. :-)

I agree with you on that one.

---druck