Quick check-in; text editor wanking

[xela]

First week on the new job was great. My brain overfloweth. I came on on Sunday (on my own, nobody asked) to get some focused time. Cutting out a bit early today because I'm under the weather. Wanted to check in with y'all first.

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In the it's always something department: One of the first things I do on any new system — has been for at least a dozen years — is install mg, a tiny terminal-based emacs.* Discovered while setting up my new machine at work that the canonical repository (as polled by homebrew) has fallen off the web. A little more searching, including groveling my personal CVS repository for the URL I used to download the source from when I built it by hand BITD, has not as yet helped. But then, I've been trying not to get sucked down a rathole by this, and just using emacs -nw instead. But it's kind of disorienting (not least because

mg <filename>

is a deeply engrained finger-macro). If anyone is also a fan of mg and has some clues, or maybe a fan of some other terminal-based emacs, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

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The texteditors.org URL I linked mg to is (mostly historically) informative, but doesn't seem to point anywhere actually useful for my purposes.

Comments

[nacht_musik]

'sudo port install mg' on my mac tells me that it is currently fetchable from http://distfiles.macports.org/mg/

[alierak.livejournal.com]

Maybe check in OpenBSD? Doesn't really look like active development, but still part of their source tree and getting updates as recently as three weeks ago.

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

You could just alias "mg"...

The reason I use Emacs is its programmability, so I wouldn't want to use something more cut-down if Emacs were available. On the embedded system I'm currently building, I installed nano because someone had already written an OpenEmbedded recipe for it, and porting Emacs would have been tedious. The tiny "ee" editor that is in the FreeBSD base system is another excellent tiny editor. Neither of them are really Emacs imitators, although they both use a lot of similar keystrokes. For relatively strict imitation, Jed and Jove are good but with different features.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

I do have to wonder, if you already have emacs installed anyway, why not just alias mg to 'emacs -nw'

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, I think the answer is mostly because I'm sentimental. BITD, mg launched noticeably faster than emacs -nw. On a modern system, I can notice the time from hitting return to being able to edit text if I'm looking for it. The only technical issues are minor (the worst of them, for instance, is that it comes up with a menubar in terminal mode for some reason (in spite of having meni-bar-mode turned off in my .emacs, which it respects when in GUI mode under MacOS or X11).

But my reaction to the suggestion to just use emacs -nw feels, more than anything else, like my reaction 20 years ago, when the SCA was in crisis and someone suggested to me that I should must get a different hobby.

[mary-anne wolf (from livejournal.com)]

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mg/ (http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mg/)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thank you, but building it from source sounds a lot like the rathole I'm trying not to get dragged down :^).

I think mostly I wrote about it because, as I was packing up to leave early because I felt crappy, it occurred to me I should let people know how my first week had gone. And the yak I was deliberately not shaving was the concrete thing that came to mind to write about.