[Info-vax] Editors, was: Re: VT keyboard replacement

[alanfe...@gmail.com]

On Friday, November 19, 2021 at 11:00:07 PM UTC-5, Tad Winters wrote:
> On 11/18/2021 2:41 PM, alanfe...--- via Info-vax wrote: 
> > On Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 1:39:07 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> >> On 2021-11-17, alanfe... at gmail.com <alanfe... at gmail.com> wrote: 
[...] 
> > AGAIN: Every time I try EVE there's a problem. At remote labs it didn't work _at all_ without a lot of fuss playing with terminal settings and whatnot. With EDT I don't have such problems. I don't have to wait half a minute to open a huge file just to change the first few lines like I do with EVE. EDT works fine for me. If you need a more powerful editor, fine! I'm not stopping you. I don't need multiple buffers on the screen at the same time in the same session. I don't need all that scripting. I just want to edit some simple DCL. OK? I'm a lowly ex-physicist who wrote a lot of stuff in FORTRAN. I've inspected Pascal code, started learning c, and dabbled a little in existing perl scripts. That's it! I'm not a professional coder! For those who are, use a more powerful editor. I'm okay with that!!! 
> > 
> > One time both EDT and EVE failed me! I needed lines longer than 255 chars, but also SET NO TRUNCATE. Neither editor has both. So I had to struggle to get the task done. 
> > 
> > The only times I need EVE is for overstrike mode and box editing. The rest of the time I like EDT, esp. now that it is not limited to 22 lines. (Actually, there may be other rare times, like wildcard searches maybe, but it's been a long, long time!) 
> >
> Many times I've used EVE to edit files whose records are 2000+ 
> characters. I never had problems. The system was running at least VMS 
> V5.5, but maybe V6.2. On what version of VMS did you last use EVE? 

On EISNER:: just a short wile ago. (OpenVMS V8.4-2L2)

My bad experiences with EVE came from my time as a graduate research assistant. That was in the late 1980s. We had various editions of v4 and v5 VAX/VMS. 

EVE was always a pain. Never worked at remote sites without a lot of fuss. Had a lot of trouble with it at "home." I've already described all those misadventures that in this thread. At some point I realized that I never had any of these problems with EDT. So EDT it was.

I last used EVE today to see how hard it would be to convert all my EDT key definitions. At least some of them might not be doable at all. Why should I bother? I'm just working on my TO.COM and maybe a few rather small DCL procedures -- both for the Freeware webpage. Again, I'm a lowly ex-physicist who worked at jobs where I could manage and work with VMS. I am not a professional coder. I don't need super whiz-bang editors. They're overkill.

Earlier in the last month or so I used EVE to update the help page in TO.COM, where overstrike mode and the box bit were quite useful. 

And what's with the multi-colored editors I saw at my last job which have god-knows-what other features? There are still too many bugs in software! I think it just means the coders can crank out bugs at a higher rate. (~_^)

BTW, why did it take so long for someone to fix the hard-coded 22-line limit on EDT? How long could it have taken? Well, I'm very happy about it now!

> <<snip>> 
> 
> > AEF 
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AEF