On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 23:06:49 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2017-04-04, rickman  wrote:
>
>> On 4/4/2017 3:36 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2017-04-04, rickman  wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 4/4/2017 6:27 AM, Kerr Mudd-John wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm thinking of getting it vaguely back on topic-ish as Yet Another
>>>>> vi v emacs debate!
>>>>
>>>> Which side are you on.  My old editor, Codewright has had a stroke
>>>> and I am finally learning a new one so I can use the same editor on
>>>> the rPi and the PC.  Right now I am struggling to learn Emacs as I
>>>> have heard so much good about it.  But it doesn't do much through the
>>>> GUI.  :(
>>>
>>> I took a look at emacs a while ago.  However it was just a bit too
>>> foreign to wrap my head around.  I think tab handling was the straw
>>> that broke the camel's back.
>>
>> What does it do with tabs?  Codewright could be pretty weird.  The
>> choices were to replace tabs with spaces (which means deleting them is
>> a PITA) or using tabs (which means putting them in lots of times when
>> you are trying not to).  Didn't seem to have a middle ground of
>> inserting tabs when you hit the tab key one.  But maybe I missed an
>> option or two.
>
> That's the problem I was having.  I'm stuck in a nasty middle ground
> where I want to indent my C code by multiples of 4 spaces, and many
> programs (e.g. cat) assume a tab every 8 spaces.  So I wind up typing 4
> spaces for the first level of indentation, tab for the second level, tab
> plus four spaces for the third level, two tabs for the fourth, etc.  I'm
> the first to admit that it's ugly - especially when moving a block of
> code and changing its indentation.  But the only alternative is to do
> away with tabs altogether, and as you say it's a PITA.  I can't remember
> just what emacs did or how much work I'd have to do to make it work, but
> it was almost as ugly, and not too compatible with cat and friends.

this is nothing to do with cat as shuch it is the default unix tab
specification
it can be changed in many ways using the tabs command

for example

tabs +4 will set your tabs to every 4th column.

>
>>>> Does VI even run on the PC?  How well does it deal with the Unix NL
>>>> vs. PC CR/LF issue?  Codewright would just preserve what it saw used
>>>> in the file being edited.  That was *great*.
>>>
>>> Dunno about a Windoze version of vi, but I'm sure something exists.
>>> However, if I call up a file that has CRLF line endings in vi on my
>>> Linux box, each line has a blue "^M" at the end; the CRLF endings are
>>> preserved.
>>
>> What did it do on your Linux box when you opened a DOS file and typed
>> some extra lines?  Did the new lines have the CR inserted too?
>
> (I couldn't remember so I did a quick test just now.)  No, they went in
> with LF only, just like a normal *n*x line.  I could delete the ^M
> character at the end of existing lines, but I couldn't think of a quick
> way to put one back.  I'm sure some vi guru will have a magic
> solution...





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