Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!pyramid!prls!philabs!ttidca!kevin
From: kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: VI BUG -- 4.2 and 4.3 at least
Summary: Gee, I thought this was a feature.
Keywords: vi ex bug
Message-ID: <2807@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 28 Jun 88 01:04:00 GMT
References: <5276@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: kevin@ttidcb.tti.com (Kevin Carothers)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 50

In article 260 (David A. Rabson) writes:

>So it appears that when yanking with the `e' or ` command, one character fewer 
>than expected is actually grabbed.  It turns out that exactly the same
>problem afflicts the E,w, and W commands, but not the f command.  I repeated
>the problem on three different machines running 4.2 and 4.3.

[---other stuff---]

>Now it would seem that adding a space (or l) after the e in the third
>example would be a somewhat kludgy patch, but it still fails at the end
>of a line.
>
>Has this bug been reported previously?
>
>                                David Rabson
>                                davidra@helios.tn.cornell.edu
>                                Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics
>                                Clark Hall, Cornell University
>                                Ithaca, NY 14853-2501


I think that this was designed into vi because of some sort of logic
concerning whether or not to append a new-line at the end of the text
line.

Vi has a rather fast (read "simple") screen painting algorithm that
works on a rather vast array of different terminal types. Personally I
can't imagine trying to build a "generic" editor that switches with
relative ease  between terminals that have line/page scrolling,
wrap/nowrap, advanced/no cursor positioning, etc...

Support for just about any terminal made is a *REALLY NICE* feature
of vi that I haven't seen too many editors do to the degree that vi has.

It would be easy enough to make a "vi-like" editor that really 
hums on a VT-100 or the like, but might be limited on the  
other terminals vi runs on.

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