On Mon, 2007-21-05 at 11:47 +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
Michael T. Richter wrote:
1. A real GUI environment that takes into account some of the HID advances made in the past 30 years. (Emacs and Vim don't count, in other words.)
That particular part is trolling. Both emacs and vim take into account many of the HID advances made in the past 30 years. You're going to have to be more explicit about what you find unacceptable about them to get useful answers, in my opinion.
Vim is eliminated before it reaches the gate because it's a modal
editor. Even with GVim in place, it still has that modal stench to it
that leaps up and bites at awkward moments. And HID advances (the modal
issue aside)? Go to an underpowered little editor like Gedit (what I
use currently for raw Haskell, but which sadly isn't applicable to .lhs
files of either stripe) and adjust your editing preferences. It's not a
particularly good programmer's editor, but look at the lovely tabbed
dialog box with all those lovely HID bits like checkboxes, radio
buttons, spin buttons, dropdown lists, lists, etc. Now do the same in
GVim and get ... a text file with some editing tricks to make things
slightly easier. (It's not immediately obvious how to get rid of it
either.) Where is the accounting for HID advances there? (Raw Vim is
even worse.)
Hell, even comparing the out-of-the-box syntax highlighting support in
Gedit vs. (G)Vim is instructive. Code like "makeRandomValueST :: StdGen
-> (MyType, StdGen)" (which, incidentally, was far easier to copy from
in Gedit than GVim to paste into this message) only differentiates "::"
and "->" from the text and delimiters in GVim while in Gedit (keeping in
mind that Gedit isn't a very good editor!) differentiates those plus
"makeRandomValueST" vs. "StdGen" and "MyType". And the parentheses.
(G)Vim is losing to freakin' GEDIT here! The Notepad of the GNOME
world.
Emacs is its own set of nightmares. I'm not even going to start going
down the path of that particular holy war (and bucky-bit Hell). I'll
acknowledge freely that it's an incredibly powerful programming
environment. It just really doesn't play well with others at almost any
level and quite definitely doesn't have anything resembling modern HID
thought behind it. (To be fair to it, it does predate most modern HID
work by a couple of decades.)
--
Michael T. Richter