Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Fortran
Message-ID: <13434@think.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 87 22:06:44 GMT
References: <332@siemens.UUCP> <453@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@sauron.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 44

In article <453@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
>The really sad thing about emacs is that it doesn't have a way to
>highlight selected regions of a buffer.  This renders a mouse pretty
>much useless except for positioning.  If emacs could hightlight
>regions, one could select words, sentences, and paragraphs with a mouse
>and then delete them or copy them with a single keystroke.  I've used
>a version of emacs that uses a mouse to do these sorts of things
>WITHOUT highlighting them first, and this is worse than nothing.  You
>just don't know what you're doing until it's done.  Sure, you can get
>it back if you deleted something you wanted, but first you have to
>figure out what happened.  The visual feedback BEFORE the operation is
>committed to is important.

What universal law says that an Emacs-style editor can't highlight
things or use a mouse?  Zmacs, the Emacs-style editor on MIT-derived
Lisp Machines, does both of these things.  When you invoke a command
that marks a region, the region is underlined (there is an option to
use inverse video instead of underlining).  And I have used at least
one Unix implementation of Emacs that always shows the character under
the mark in inverse video (this can be confusing on a terminal whose
cursor is a non-blinking block, since you wouldn't be able to tell
point from mark except by typing Control-F and seeing which one
moves).

As for mouse support, Zmacs allows you to move around the buffer and
mark regions using the mouse.  This is appropriately
context-sensitive, so that in Lisp Mode you can point to a parenthesis
and mark the entire S-expression with a mouse click.  Symbolics Genera
7.0 and beyond implements much more extensive support; for example,
you can point to a line of code and set a breakpoint with the mouse.
GNU Emacs also implements mouse support when it is run under the X
Window System.

If you are going to complain about particular editors, do so.  But
"EMACS" is generic, and refers to a large class of editors running on
a wide variety of computer systems ranging from PC's to mainframes.


---
Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
seismo!think!barmar