Kent M Pitman  <pitman@world.std.com> wrote:
>Jason Chesshir <jason@kioken.com> writes:
+---------------
| The key thing about Emacs, and editors like it, is that they support
| various important operations for managing lisp expressions.  Balanced
| paren flashing, for example, and the ability to do single-keystroke
| motion commands like forward-expression, backward-expression,
| delete-expression-forward, delete-expression-backward, up-expression,
| and so on.  If you find another editor that can do these, you might also
| be happy.
+---------------

Note that most "vi" variants/clones include most of this set of features.
Balanced paren-flashing, of course. Single-keystroke forward/backward
expression: If you're on the left or right paren of an s-expr, the "%"
key will move the cursor to the matching paren. Likewise, if you're on
the left or right paren of an s-expr, "d%" will delete the s-expr. If by
"up-expression" you mean go out one level, well, that's not always *one*
keystroke, but usually a short sequence of "%" + space will get you to
the end fast enough, or "f)%" to step backwards to the beginning. And
the autoindent makes it easy enough to format Lisp properly, even if it
doesn't *enforce* proper indenting or do form-dependent indenting for you.

And FWIW, the latest version of "nvi" has hooks for extensibility with
Perl or Tcl (or your favorite scripting interpreter).

So while "vi" will never be as perfectly tuned to Lisp as Emacs is,
for me it's good enough... [Which is fortunate for me since, sadly,
my fingers just don't seem to work correctly with typing control keys
all the time.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 31-2-510		rpw3@sgi.com
SGI Network Engineering		<URL:http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/>
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