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