[TUHS] screen editors

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 9, 2020, at 9:21 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

The Rand editor made good use of multiple windows. You could set things up so
that two windows would scroll *in sync*. This is handy e.g. when you are looking
at two columns or rows that far apart in the same file or in different files and
too large so you need to scroll.

Acme makes even better use of multiple windows. Right click on a compile error
message in one window and the cursor moves the error causing line in the source
file in another window etc. You can repeat as many times as you want.

So I tend to think combining multiple windows and editing can be effective.

> 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.

Finding the "right cut" of functionality is not easy. Scheme or Common Lisp?
Editors and a set of tools or an all singing all dancing IDE? Can one implement
something like Photoshop as a set of separate tools that can be combined any way?

What old style Unix tools give you is isolation and (one way) controlled
communication. Can this model be generalized to a set of Lego blocks out of
which one can compose even complex tools such as Photoshop as easily is an open
question.