[3772] in SIPB bug reports
vile, xvile installed in sipb locker
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Fri May 21 18:12:59 1993
Date: Fri, 21 May 93 18:12:44 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
To: bug-sipb@athena.mit.edu
I installed the tty and X versions of the editor "VILE" for DECstation,
VAX, RT, Sparc/Solaris, RS/6000, and Linux in the sipb locker. Here is
part of the README file:
VILE -- VI Like Emacs: a vi workalike put together from Micro-Emacs by Paul Fox
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This editor grew out of a frustration that although lots of
eager programmers have tackled rewrites of Emacs, with new and
better features (not to mention free source), I've not seen
anything similar done with the Second True Editor. (The
First, of course, being /bin/ed)
So I took a copy of MicroEmacs 3.9 (which I've since
discovered was out of date, unfortunately) and turned it
into a vi "feel-alike". It retains the multiple
buffer/multiple window features of uemacs, but the
"finger-feel", if you will, is very much that of vi. It is
definitely not a clone, in that some substantial stuff is
missing, and the screen doesn't look quite the same. But what
matters most is that one's "muscle memory" does the right thing
to the text in front of you, and that is what vile tries to do
for vi users. THIS IS NOT A "CLONE"! But it feels good.
(Put another way, the things that you tend to type over and
over probably work -- things done less frequently, like configuring
a .exrc file, are quite different.)
This is the second really public release of vile. Users of
previous versions will hopefully find many new features -- see the
CHANGES file for details.
The collective developers of Micro-Emacs should be
complimented that the changes were as easy as they were. The
code was pretty clean and well designed before I started on
it. I'm not sure that the same can be said anymore...
The benefits over standard vi include:
- multiple files open at once
- multiple windows on the screen
- a larger set of operator commands
- the possibility of porting to your favorite micro.
- more uniform undo/yank register treatment
- using tags doesn't lose your last search pattern
- "next error" cursor positioning after compilation
Of course, it _may_ lack some of vi's reliability. :-)
Take a look at vile.hlp for more information about features
and differences.
In general, I suspect that the quality of the code is roughly
on a par with MicroEmacs. I've been using vile regularly under
both SunOS and 386 UNIX for almost two years, with no major problems
(that haven't been fixed). Version three was built and used by
many others on the net, and their feedback was invaluable.
I think all of the reported bugs have been fixed, and hopefully
not too many new ones introduced.
I have not run this much on a small system, and not much at all on
DOS. Pete Rusczinski has done an excellent job of porting
version three to DOS -- his changes are now incorporated here (as
of version 3.20), but since in general the DOS version has been
less well exercised than the UNIX version, it probably harbors
more bugs.
Hope you enjoy --
Paul G. Fox June, 1991, and February, 1992
pgf@cayman.com
p.s. By the way, I'm _not_ the same Paul Fox who wrote Crisp, the Brief
work-alike.
