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E text editor version 2 released

e-texteditor.com

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Re: E text editor version 2 released

#21

Post by tene »

edanm wrote: post #16
naner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a situation where this functionality would be useful. Can you give an example?

When I get some time, I'll write it up more fully with some screencasts. For now, I'll try explaining: the way I think of it is, it lets you do the exact same thing as macros, except live. Macros in vim/emacs/others are often touted as a great feature, and they are. In vim for example, formatting a huge column of, say, html text involves formatting one row using the proper keyboard commands, then repeating the action…

I do that with macros all the time in vim.

    qa
    
    q
    
    @a
It's not clear to me at all why I wouldn't dream of doing that in a macro, or how that's not light-weight. Can you explain a bit more what the perceived problem of using macros for this it?

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#22

Post by tene »

sanswork wrote: post #15
naner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a situation where this functionality would be useful. Can you give an example?

When one doesn't know how to use regexs for S&R?

Then you spend ten minutes learning the basics of a very powerful, widely-used tool that will support your text-editing tasks for many years to come.

I've often seen reluctance to actually put in time to learn powerful tools. I plan to be programming and working as a sysadmin for many years to come, and it's obvious to me that the sooner I learn to use more-powerful tools, the greater the benefit is to me over the rest of my programming career. You can get the basics of regular expressions down in an hour or so, and progressively learn more as you encounter it, and that benefit will pay off repeatedly, and yet I've seen many people refusing to learn things like that.

Anyone have any insight into this?

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#23

Post by mark_l_watson »

I just got an email about the free update today. I only boot my Windows laptop about once a week, but I am looking forward to kicking the tires of the new version. Good editor.

E makes developing on Windows 7 nicer, but not as nice as OS X or Ubuntu.

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#24

Post by edanm »

tene wrote: post #21
edanm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I get some time, I'll write it up more fully with some screencasts. For now, I'll try explaining: the way I think of it is, it lets you do the exact same thing as macros, except live. Macros in vim/emacs/others are often touted as a great feature, and they are. In vim for example, formatting a huge column of, say, html text involves formatting one row using the proper keyboard commands, then repeating the action…

I do that with macros all the time in vim. qa q @a It's not clear to me at all why I wouldn't dream of doing that in a macro, or how that's not light-weight. Can you explain a bit more what the perceived problem of using macros for this it?

OK, "you wouldn't dream" is a little rhetorical. There are obviously users much more skilled than me who do use it. I'll try and answer from my perspective. Sorry this post got long: I'm a big fan of editors, and I really think this multiple-cursor thing is one of the most important new things to happen in text-editing recently.

I used vim for a solid few months (not that much, I know) and emacs for a while before that. I used both to create macros, but I found one problem: I almost never managed to make the macro work exactly right the first time. This is probably something that gets better with practice, but every time I set out to create a macro, it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc.

None of this is a reason not to use macros: they still save time when dealing with a lot of text. But this overhead, both the debugging overhead and the "mental" overhead of thinking all these details through, definitely stopped me from using them for macros I'd only use once.

On the other hand, in Sublime, let's say I have two similar "if"s. I select the first "if", hit "ctrl+d" and it selects the second "if", and then I can just start editing. I move the cursor down, move it to the place I want to edit, edit away, all the while not having to think explicitly about this, since I can see everything that happens as it's happening. This is just much more intuitive, and not just for me: other programmers who don't have the same "love of editors" I have watch me do this, and actually ask how to do it too. These are people who wouldn't ever think of using a macro.

I hope that explains why I much prefer it. I really think this is the biggest "revolution" in text editing that's happened in the last few years, and I really recommend you at least try it a bit. I promise I'll blog about this on www.loopycode.com sometime soon, with actual screencasts and some better examples.

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#25

Post by edanm »

tene wrote: post #22
sanswork wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one doesn't know how to use regexs for S&R?

Then you spend ten minutes learning the basics of a very powerful, widely-used tool that will support your text-editing tasks for many years to come. I've often seen reluctance to actually put in time to learn powerful tools. I plan to be programming and working as a sysadmin for many years to come, and it's obvious to me that the sooner I learn to use more-powerful tools, the greater the benefit is to me over the re…

I think it's a mix. First, learning is hard. Even if it's worth the time, it's still hard. Easier to be lazy and not learn anything, even if you know better.

Second, most new tools are not worth learning. More importantly, learning all the tools that make you better is definitely a wrong move. So people are naturally reluctant: they figure if it's really important, they'll learn it eventually when they run into it again (like the proverbial sysadmin who doesn't do anything unless he's asked to do it 4 times).

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#26

Post by bnjamin »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #20

E was my editor of choice when Windows was my primary OS and a very nice editor it was. It's a shame there's no Linux version :(

The author open sourced most of the code. You can find it here http://github.com/etexteditor/e you should be able to compile a version that works with linux.

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#28

Post by tene »

edanm wrote: post #24
tene wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do that with macros all the time in vim. qa q @a It's not clear to me at all why I wouldn't dream of doing that in a macro, or how that's not light-weight. Can you explain a bit more what the perceived problem of using macros for this it?

OK, "you wouldn't dream" is a little rhetorical. There are obviously users much more skilled than me who do use it. I'll try and answer from my perspective. Sorry this post got long: I'm a big fan of editors, and I really think this multiple-cursor thing is one of the most important new things to happen in text-editing recently. I used vim for a solid few months (not that much, I know) and emacs for a while before th…

That's definitely informative and interesting. I feel like I'm missing something, though. How exactly does multi-cursor solve the problems you express with macros?

    it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc.
Does sublime's multi-cursor support move the cursors around differently? If the next piece isn't positioned the same in the two hunks you're editing, don't you have to use searches to find it with multi-cursors too, or are you suggesting that Sublime has a way of knowing what you're wanting to edit, and moves the cursor around for you?

Re: E text editor version 2 released

#29

Post by edanm »

tene wrote: post #28
edanm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, "you wouldn't dream" is a little rhetorical. There are obviously users much more skilled than me who do use it. I'll try and answer from my perspective. Sorry this post got long: I'm a big fan of editors, and I really think this multiple-cursor thing is one of the most important new things to happen in text-editing recently. I used vim for a solid few months (not that much, I know) and emacs for a while before th…

That's definitely informative and interesting. I feel like I'm missing something, though. How exactly does multi-cursor solve the problems you express with macros? it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc. Does sublime's multi-cursor support move the cursors around differently? If the next piece isn't positioned the…

Good catch - my post was long enough so I didn't get into it.

Mostly, this isn't a problem - you can move around using ctrl+arrow keys, which moves by words. Most repetitive code is usually close enough that this solves most problems, though once in a while you'll need to think of some "creative" things to do. These are usually easy, like hitting home, and because you see everything, you can easily see when you need to do it, and what you need to do.

Having said that, there are still some things missing from Sublime Text. I think this whole multi-cursor thing is brilliant and the future of text editing, but we still have to discover a lot of the tricks.

For example, Sublime has nothing like vim's "forward to char" command. This is an absolute must when using multi-cursors, since there are times when moving by words isn't enough. I had to implement this myself (very easy to extend Sublime), since it's extremely useful.

Also, I implemented a few new ways of making multiple selections. For example, I implemented a small function that splits up a selection by a char. So, I can select the inside of a function's variable list (e.g. for "foo(int a, char b)", I'd select the inside of the parans). Then, I use my function and split by the ",", which effectively gives me two selections, one covering "int a", and the other covering "char b". I can then cut these, go to a new line, and paste these on two lines. In this way, I can take a function with 6 variables and easily manipulate each of them, for example assigning them to "this.m_a", etc. This is possible because of a function I implemented for myself, and shows the kind of power I think this kind of editing will have the more people get exposed to it.

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