Re: SEU versus vi and Vim

As a long-time Emacs nut, I really ought to try to rise to the bait...

One thing I will say about Emacs is that what attracted me to it, and
continues to after many years, is the ease and extent to which it can be
extended. I know that Vim has had some kind of scripting language grafted
onto it and I gather that some people find it useful, but a nice thing
about Emacs is the degree to which the editor is written in its own
extension language (Emacs Lisp), which means that much of the guts of the
program are exposed and easily accessible to anyone who wants to customize
just about anything.

I believe the consensus among the Emacs developers is that Emacs does have
some work to do where it comes to certain modern features like automatic
refactoring -- and it is being actively developed. Emacs is generally
very good for the things that Emacs users typically do, and not so good
for things they don't do. It never really got competitive with Eclipse
for Java development, I think because more of the Emacs user base are CS
people and scientists and the like, rather than business users. If you
want to develop Lisp, there's nothing better, of course. One nice thing
about the extensibility is that there are many external packages you can
add for just about anything you can think of (there was even an RPG mode,
once, and I wrote a CL mode just for basic syntax highlighting myself some
years ago.). And if you don't like the default keybindings ("keyboard
shortcuts"), you can change them.

The down-side, then, is that you have do do a certain amount of system
integration and Lisp hacking to get really complex things working the way
you really want them to. If it's worth it to you, then you do it, and if
not -- not.

Now, the only other family of editors that have something like Emacs Lisp
that I know of are actually the IBM editors like Xedit on the mainframe,
and some of its knock-offs, like The Hessling Editor. They can be
customized (to some extent, I'm not sure how much) and "macro-ified" using
Rexx. Unfortunately, I have no more than trivial experience using Xedit
and family. The interface of SEU is similar to these editors, but as far
as I know, SEU cannot be extended with Rexx. What I'd really like to know
-- and it's a serious question -- is why not? I think it's a shame that
there is no native green-screen editor for the i that you can customize
like Xedit (or Emacs, for that matter). Maybe it puts too much power in
the hands of the users (a motive I could ascribe to IBM, and few others)
or maybe they think writing editor code to make your work more efficient
is a waste of time. I don't know.

I know almost nothing about Code/400, but I have this notion that there
was an editor called LPEX that was similar to Xedit and used Rexx as an
extension language. Not sure though. Maybe nobody cared.

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