What text editor do you use?

Newsgroups: alt.cobol,alt.religion.emacs,alt.folklore.computers, alt.religion.kibology,comp.lang.cobol
From: bmckeon@tcd.ie (Brendan McKeon)
Subject: Re: What text editor do you use ?

rdd@access1.digex.net (R. D. Davis) writes:

> As to text editors, my favorite one is a pen and paper.

Another notepad fan. Sure, they're portable - but cut'n'paste on those things is damn messy. Not to mention the fact that on many models, you have to format the pages manually. (Notepad rules! Yeah, right.)

And then there's the memory management problems - pages can easily get detached or even lost, and dirty pages are a pain to read. (This is usually caused by caffiene overflow, for example. Cola is even worse, as it renders the affected pages permanently sticky - copying and discarding them is usually the only option.)

And if you've ever tried to transcribe something, you'll know just how much page swapping goes on... (Unless, of course, you use the 'cp' (carbon paper) option)

It's pretty useful for storing small graphics and diagrams, though. Although it can *only* cope with _small_ graphics and diagrams - if you try anything large, you're quite likely to run into all sorts of page boundary problems. For big graphics, systems such as the WhiteBoard that have a large flat addressable area are much better, although, of course, you do end up sacrificing portability.

Lookup/searching is usually dire - linear search is nearly always required. You'd think there'd be something better - most notepads are based on a tree-derived structure, after all. (... although I have seen some purpose-built nodepads which are designed for storing personal monikers (along with associated resident address and telephonic reference ID) - these have alphanumeric tags attached to certain pages, which allows for a fast lookup by use of the [index] finger(1) method.)

The fonts on those things are pretty ugly too - every single one that I've used has been almost illegible. I think it may be a problem with my PEN driver, though - other people seem to manage fine. Maybe it's just not my type.