Many thanks to all who responded to my query. This is a great list, as
befits a great text editor (or should one call it a ``window
manager''?).
I hope you all don't mind if I share a few words about wily/acme.
I'm an historian by training, and I spend most of my day writing about
medieval Arabic manuscripts. Lots of messy text manipulation. Lots of
LaTeX. Lots of XML database entries.
Wily is simply the most efficient and pain-free way to do what I do.
Nothing else that I've tried comes close. For instance, I just
finished compiling the indices for a recent book. I rather suspect
that doing this with one of the traditional editors for MacOS or Unix
would easily have taken twice, maybe three times as long. And who
knows what damage it would have done to my poor hands. I still
remember the pains in my hands that resulted from my time as an emacs
user.
What do I like best about wily?
1. Cording for cut and paste. Such a simple idea, and yet such an
efficient way to do things.
2. The ability to take the results of a command and go immediately to
the file and the line in question. Take, for instance, a directory
containing 15 chapters of a book. Grep -n and there you have every
instance of the \pageref that you need. And with one click you've got
the file open at the spot you need. Or what if your copy editor tells
you that you need to capitalize some word when used in some contexts
but not in others. Same thing. Imagine the time it would take to do
this with another GUI editor (BBEdit, e.g.).
3. Seamless integration via pipes to standard unix utils and to custom
text filters. An example, my XML database project receives entries
from a variety of different contributors. They are allowed to mark up
the text for transliterated Arabic using a variety of transliteration
schemes: ArabTeX, LaTex diacritics, or any number of the French,
German, or English practices. I receive the entries. Select all. And
then send the text to one of the dozen little Cocoa text filters I
wrote. Voila. UTF8 text with transliterated characters in the format
required for the project.
4. The ability to work with Unicode. Granted, I have not figured out
if it's possible to have a variety of input methods. Still, who needs
them. Write your Georgian or Greek text in transliteration, send to
filter, and instant UTF8.
Wishlist:
1. An optical mouse, with three wide buttons ...
2. Flicker free redrawing of text.
3. Syntax highlighting. I'd be curious to hear what others think on
the subject. I am surprised how much I miss it when I've got a chapter
with 200 small footnotes.
4. Better documentation for non-specialists such as myself. I'm
trying to do my small part here. You all can expect a contribution
soon: Wily and Unicode for Dummies.
5. A default color schema that more closely approaches acme's soothing
palette.
6. Packaged version for MacOS X. I'm working on that too. (I might
add that I have been using wily with Apple's X server for some months
now, and it seems to work as it should.)
But I go on.
Cheers, John
