How annoying are Linux text editors to us everyday humans?

Call them shortcuts, hotkeys, or accelerators, but for some strange reason, Linux console text editors are specifically engineered to be stupid.

Control-alt-cokebottle-F16 to cursor one character to the right?  Gee, that’s so usable.

If it’s not that, it’s an editor that by default isn’t an editor but a viewer. What the.

I just want an editor that can edit a file.  I don’t need some kind of crazy “text development environment” for everyday editing.  Editors like that have their place for sure, but absolutely not for beginners and not for everyday use.

After a decade, only a handful of text editors are worth mentioning, and even these are pretty sad.

• aee
• nano
• mcedit (midnight commander’s editor)

I’ve known about Hisham Muhammad for a while now, because of GoboLinux.  I was even prepared to use Gobo as my main desktop, but its development has been crawling.  When I bumped into his replacement for ‘top’ named htop I was impressed.  No, I was astounded.

Completely separately, I bumped into a new console editor project, dit.  It’s pre-release, some nice features.. and.  Oh hell, it’s one of Hisham’s projects, I have to check this out.

I can’t contain my glee.  Here are the totally groundbreaking features, never before seen all together in one editor.

• The ability to page up and down.  Revolutionary!
• Control-left and control-right to hop words.  Amazing!
• Control-s to save, control-q to quit.  Incredible!
• Control-c to copy, control-x to cut, control-v to paste.  Astounding!

There’s no sarcasm there at all either.  A usable text editor.

Mind you, dit is pre-release and it’s missing a whole huge whack of stuff.  I hope to see home/end, control-home/end, control-up/down and simple menus.  To be honest, I can’t think of much else I’d need except for decent search and replace functionality.

It’s also got highlighting, some indentation wizardry, and probably other stuff I haven’t discovered yet.

Wonderful.  So very wonderful.  I really hope it gets finished.

In other news, I decided to implement a DOS editor wrapper using DOSBox.  Yes, it actually works.  This is the kind of fun functionality I’ll be further-exploring for Oldschool Linux.

: << TODO

Long filenames are truncated automatically.  Create a workaround:
- count the length of the filename
- create a temporary working filename of legal length
- upon exiting back to Linux, overwrite the original file

Long paths explode in a messy way.  Create a workaround:
- copy the filename to a temporary location
- upon exiting back to Linux, overwrite the original file

Maybe I just ought to do both of those things by default.

Possibly explore DOS long filename drivers.

TODO

edit() {
  # A Linux path to your dos stuff.
  dosdir="/home/user/_public/live/dos/dos/"
  # This is a path from the C: DOSBox mountpoint.
  editor="C:\dos\edit.com"
#   editor="C:\8088\utils\ted3.com"
#   editor="C:\8088\utils\works\works.exe"
  # create the file if it doesn't already exist?
#   create=1

  file=$1

  # This routine is good for editors which complain about a file not existing
  #  first, like Microsoft Works 3.0
  if [ $create -eq 1 ]; then
    # If it doesn't exist
    if [ ! -f $file ]; then
      # Create it
      echo : >> $file
    fi
  fi

  # get the full path of $1
  file=`readlink -f $file`
  # now convert /path/to/file to the DOS-style \path\to\file
  file=`echo $file|sed 's/\//\\\/g'`
  echo "D:$file"

  # DOSBox doesn't like it if you mount the root.
  # If some future version complains, then as root do something like:
  #   mount -o bind / /home/user/mounted-root
  dosbox \
  -c "mount d /" \
  -c "mount c $dosdir" \
  -c "c:" \
  -c "$editor D:$file" \
  -c "exit"
}

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