From: gregm@otc.otca.oz.au (Greg McFarlane)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Vile version 3.25
Date: 4 Sep 92 09:00:11 GMT
Organization: R&D, OTC Sydney, Australia

I have been a vi user for many years, so my fingers know exactly where
to go without my thinking.  This has prevented my moving to another
editor with more features such as emacs - the relearning effort would
be too great.  So I was immensely pleased when I came across "vile"
(vi-like emacs) - it offers the "finger-feel" of vi and some of the
multi-buffering multi-windowing features of emacs.  The best of both
worlds, I hope.

Given that, there are some things I am not sure of in vile.  If anyone
knows the answers to any of the following problems, please let me
know.  Environment is sunos/xterm/mitX/twm.

  1 Is there an archive of vile macros, as there is for vi?  Does
    anyone have any neat example .vilerc files?

  2 In vi I have g mapped to G.  I tried to write a vile macro to do
    the same:
	3 store-macro
	    goto-line
	~endm
	bind-key execute-macro-3 g
    Both g and G go to the end of the file, but whereas 1000G goes to
    line 1000, 1000g goes to the end of the file 1000 times!

  3 I often want to sequentially view several files.  In vi, to see
    how far I am through the list of files, I use :args which prints
    the filenames that were given on the command line in order.  Is
    there an equivalent in vile?  Similarly, is it possible to get
    vile to prompt you if you try to exit without viewing all the
    files that were given on the command line?

  4 What happens if the system crashes?  Is there any recovery
    mechanism like vi's -r option?

  5 The incremental-search command does not seem to work if you escape
    a character with \ (for example to search for a real "$" using the
    sequence "^XS\$" gives me the error:
    	"[Bad pattern: trailing \ ]").

  6 It would be nice if the cmode-style autoindenting would do the
    same thing with () and [] as it does with {}.  This would be
    useful for writing function calls with lots of arguments.

  7 In cmode, is it possible to get vile to return to the previous
    indentation on the line after a # directive?

  8 Help file installation should be easier.  Currently, to install
    the vile.hlp file in a non-standard place requires modifying the
    appropriate list in epath.h.  Maybe this could be put into the
    makefile somehow?

  9 There should be a note in the help file that the comment character
    is ";".

 10 As suggested by the help page, I have put this into my .vilerc:
 	bind-key flip-til ~
    However, this does not get read correctly, as is shown by the
    output from :describe-bindings
    	"flip-character"                ~
	"flip-til"                      E       ^A-~
		"~"
    Instead of binding flip-til to ~ it gets bound to E!


Thanks for any help anyone can give. And thanks to all who had a hand in
developing this wonderful piece of software.


Greg

-- 

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