Re: Emacs: a 21st century text-editor

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Christopher G D Tipper wrote:
> 1 Text-wrapping. Text wrapping is a limitation, and it would be nice
>   to scroll past the edge of the screen. This is particularly acute in
>   my case editing XSLT scripts where line-breaks become a
>   presentational issue. Sometimes I actually need to compose documents
>   with 250 columns, and I don't appreciate emacs telling me otherwise.

Do you mean that you want a horizontal scrollbar, or are you just (like 
me) annoyed by those arrows left and right when a line is long?

BTW, emacs people: take a look at how Apple TextEdit handles long lines; 
that's more like in a word processor, but if you type up or down, you 
move in screen lines, even though it's just one line in the file.

> 3 Tabbed buffers. Open buffers should be easily visible in a tabbed
>   layout below the menu, in the manner of XEmacs. A proper history
>   list would help here so that documents are persistent across
>   sessions.

That would be nice.  Having everything mostly available in a text buffer 
is somewhat antiquated.  Similarly something like Cmd-left/right (or 
Ctrl-left on Windows/Linux) would be nice for switching between Tabs.

> 4 File Dialogs. I use dlgopen.el on Windows, which gets rid of the
>   most serious interface issue of all, the lack of modern file
>   dialogs. It wouldn't be rocket-science to adapt the interface to
>   support this. XEmacs file dialogs are unusable IMHO.

I use drag-and-drop to put files into emacs sometimes (on the Mac), but 
having it recognize standard open/close keymappings would be nice too, 
as would be dialogs.

> 5 Paste replaces edit. This idea that when I paste I end up with both
>   the replacement text and the old text does not belong in the modern
>   idiom. This is a real versioning issue when the replacement text
>   scrolls past the bottom of the screen. I think this is just an
>   old-fashioned feature that never got updated.

And make mark and backspace delete the marked text.