Once more I was blessed with the privilege of reading an unambiguous man page that allowed me to get right into learning a new editor. Man, I love OpenBSD's man pages! Of course those years of vim were stomping all over my attempts as I kept hitting 'ESCAPE' out of habit, among other things. Thankfully I was able to break the habit rather quickly and even found the Emacs way more productive.
Navigating and editing a line is much faster now that I don't have to switch modes. Using ALT-Backspace is convenient since in mg it will delete the space just before the cursor AND the word before that. This gets used a lot for spelling errors and general changes to a sentence. Using ALT-q is amazing since it automatically wraps an entire paragraph no matter where I am in the block, no need to highlight the whole block and THEN wrap. Editing multiple full-screen buffers is simple and much preferred over using split-screen methods in vim. I especially like the fact that line editing is similar to what I use on the command line. I've never bothered with vi-style line editing in the shell, it just sounds... wrong.
There are some things about mg that seemed like cons at first. The biggest one is a complete lack of highlighting of any kind, even when selecting a block of text... Everything is black and white, UTF-8 is not supported. Feeling limited, I installed joe as a potential replacement and was happy to have colours again. This experiment lasted maybe a week before I deleted it.
The "jmacs" editor doesn't reposition the cursor automatically when navigating a block of text, it stays in the same column unless the current line is longer than the column position. This gets confusing very quickly and is not something I can get past. Likewise, spaces and tabs on an otherwise blank line are left there, whereas in mg they get deleted (which is sensible, really). The use of ALT-Backspace is annoying since it does NOT behave the same as on mg; it treats a space as a word and stops there... Setting up the config file was especially annoying and was only made possible by editing the enormous example config. I won't go into too much detail, but putting EVERYTHING into the same config file is just not right, nor is having the most unusual method of toggling options by "putting them in the first column". The f#!k does that even mean? Oh, I see! You put a space BEFORE any options that should be disabled, but then delete that space to enable it... Why? Because GNU, that's why. Oh, and tabs
are treated as four spaces by default, as-per the GNU religion, though it can be set to eight...
Alright, enough of that. I don't want this to become a holy-war post or yet another rant. The point is, the Emacs mode of joe (jmacs for short) is rather nice, but overall there are some quirks that I just don't like. So this would raise a rather interesting question; can I live without colours in my editor?
Yes. Yes I can.
Because NetBSD on a tiny 8" IPS display with single 80x30 windows and monochrome (yellow) text is exactly what I was using for months before this, complete with that classic analogue fuzziness of VGA with the faint scrolling lines of static from the HDMI cable (I used the same display for both the Bolt and the terminal). That experience revealed another prejudice I'd unknowingly carried for a long time; that an editor MUST have syntax highlighting if used to write code. This is just downright FALSE, return 1 end!
I kept joe installed for a few more days as I tested this insane idea by using mg for ALL editing tasks, code or otherwise. With few exceptions, I managed to get by just fine without the pretty colours and eventually deleted joe entirely. No more .joe-state files, no DEAD-JOE in my $HOME, no insane config files, mg all the way! This also helped relieve the stress of even _thinking_ about trying to change the colours used for syntax highlighting. I tried that once with some other editor and was horrified by what I found... It literally took days to figure out what I was looking at before I could make any changes, so a repeat of that experience was out of the question.
If there's one actual gripe about mg, I'd say that it's a lack of highlighting the selected block of text. At the very least, I'd like a visual indicator of where the mark was set since it happens often that I occidentally press SPACE and end up with a potential sticky situation. Aside from that, I have nothing to suggest in terms of changing the editor, its fine just the way it is now.
Also, I'd like to thank the developers of OpenBSD for adding this awesome little editor to the base. It really is a thoughtful gesture for those who don't like to use vi, and if not for its presence I probably would still be fighting with vim right now, or some other editor that annoys me and aims to destroy productivity.
=> ../../index.gmi Home
=> index.gmi Back to "Adventures in OpenBSD" index
