OT: Editor like CygnusEd on Amiga

From: Marko Vojinovic (vvmarko_at_panet.co.yu)
Date: 05/19/05

  • Next message: David Cary Hart: "Re: Firewall Log Analyzer" 
    To: fedora-list@redhat.com
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 23:01:56 +0000

    Hi everybody,

    I am watching the list for some time now, but this is the first time I open a
    topic. And it turned out to be off-topic... :-))

    Short version:

    Can anyone give me a recommendation about an editor that is as close as
    possible (by look, feel and function) to the famous Cygnus Editor from the
    old Amiga days?

    If not, tell me where to start if I wish to write my own text editor? Is there
    a smarter way, or just From Scratch?

    Long version:

    OK, after Amiga and CED, I have _never_ seen an editor which even resembles
    it, no matter what platform, what OS, whatever. And Linux generally is a
    place that should not miss having such a tool.

    For those of you who had no touch with Amiga and CED, these are the features I
    would wish for (and not been able to see anywhere):

    * Super-smooth scroll of text. Poetry for the eyes. If the cursor is at the
    bottom of the screen/window and I press DownArrow to go down, the whole
    screen scrolls **pixel by pixel** up, and when enough space is available
    down, a line of text appears. Since I first started using Emacs, one of the
    main disadvantages I saw was "half-a-page-jump" when I reach the bottom of
    the screen. I usually get completely lost in text (especially if doing
    C++... :-)...).

    * Twelve-character jump to the left or right on keystroke. Some shortcuts move
    you to the beginning/end of line, some to the next word or delimiter, but if
    the syntax is such that there are no "words" defined, you simply have to move
    the cursor character by character. No way to go faster. Why twelve? Not sure,
    but I guess it is an optimised value to get from anywhere to anywhere on an
    80-column line with no more than 10 keystrokes. Once you get used to it, you
    simply cannot live without it.

    * Macro support, ie. define a keyboard shortcut for *any* action of the
    cursor, no matter how complex. Example: write many equations in TeX? Just
    press F1, and the cursor creates three new lines, puts \begin{equation} in
    the first, \end{equation} in the third and itself in the second, waiting for
    the user to fill in the details. Or, just press Alt+RightArrow and the cursor
    jumps 12 characters to the right. OK, first time you have to do it manually
    in order to record a macro, but after that life is simpler.

    * Column-like selection. Select any box-shaped piece of text, and be able to
    cut, copy, paste it etc. OK, I admit, kile can do this too (that's why I use
    it... :-))...).

    * "Turbo" and "global" types of search-replace routine, and the distiction
    between the two. When ask for replace, on first found string the user is
    prompted to answer with "yes", "no", "global", "turbo" or "cancel". The yes,
    no and cancel behave as usual. Global starts to replace each occourence of
    the string by scrolling page by page in an average speed, and if the user
    presses any key, replace is stopped. Turbo does not scroll at all, but every
    occourence of the string gets replaced, and this is done _very_ fast (it was
    extremely fast on an 14 Mhz Amiga...). On every editor I came in contact
    with, there were only one of these two options, if at all.

    * Ability to replace arbitrary characters. In a replace querry the user can
    type ASCII code of the character to be replaced, and create sequences. For
    example, replace the '13' '10' combination with '10', ie eliminate carriage
    return character if followed by line feed. Or replacing 'a' with backspace
    may give interesting results. Or replacing all escape characters with nothing
    (ie. deleting them). This allows the user to manipulate binary files, if he
    wishes to (I did, on a couple of occasions).

    * Ability to display space, tab, CR and line feed with visual characters on
    demand. OK, some editors can display end of line and some can do tab, but no
    editor displays all three...

    * Box-shaped cursor that does not blink. If it covers some character, the
    character is displayed with inverse colors, while it's ASCII code is
    displayed on the status bar. I think I saw some editors that can be made to
    behave like this, but they lacked everything else.

    * Other usual text-editor stuff: syntax hilighting, static and dynamic word
    wrap on user-defined column, arbitrary positioning of tab lengths, ability to
    work with muliple files at the same time, etc... I saw that kile generally
    does most of these things, and it's good.

    * Oh, and there is one thing that I saw *nowhere*, not even in CED, and I
    needed it so badly lots of times -- the high-level search-replace querries,
    like conditional ones. Example: replace abc with ABC and def with DEF but
    only if there are no more than five characters between them. Or, replace abc
    with ABC only if it is *not* followed by fgh. And similar stuff. Of course, I
    can write a bash script to do such things, but...

    OK, maybe it is too optimistic. But I am not just dreaming, (almost) all these
    features actually _have_been_implemented_ in a _single_ program, Cygnus
    Editor, for the Amiga platforms. I have never seen anything similar on a PC
    or Mac.

    Asked Google, asked the list archives, nothing... I can use the emulator and
    use the Amiga-native program, but that is a workaround, not a solution. I
    still have my A1200 on my desk, can use that too, but file transfer to the PC
    box is not easy (although possible).

    Should I start coding an editor? How do I make text scroll smoothly, as in
    video games?

    Any thoughts are welcome!!

    Best regards, ;-)
    Marko

    P.S. If anyone wishes to know *why* do I need this or that feature, I'll be
    glad to elaborate... :-)) 

    -- 
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