On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 07:16:55PM -0700, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 04:54:53PM +0200, Laurent Bercot wrote:
> > On 27/05/2015 12:12, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > >I'm in the process of writing (yet) a(nother) editor and output formatter,
> > >and on reading this, I started to wonder -- just how could one separate
> > >a command-line version from the UI? I can see that the output
> > >formatter can be so separated (and very usefully), but the actual
> > >editing?
> >
> > Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, as I'm unfamiliar with the
> > internal of editors. But IIUC, an editor is, by definition, a user
> > interface, so the command-line / UI separation looks impossible or
> > irrelevant to me here.
> > However, there are still some separations that you can perform when
> > designing an editor. Right off the top of my head:
> > - Core functions vs. actual interface, which could be terminal-based
> > or X-based. Think vim vs. gvim, or emacs -nw.
> > - programmable editor commands vs. interface to enter those commands.
> > Think the sed engine in vi, or the LISP engine in emacs.
> >
> > If you factor your work correctly, it should be trivial for a program
> > to get access to your editor commands via a library function call - and
> > you can make a command-line tool to wrap useful calls. Also, there could
>
> nvi (the Berkeley rewrite of vi, after abandoning their first version)
> uses a shared backend (vi-ipc) connected to the frontend via pipe().
> There are about four frontends: terminfo-based (curses was derived
> from the code for this), tk, motif, and gtk.
> I ended up finding out this as a result of making the motif frontend
> build/work again.

Thanks. I should probably look into that. It might be illumination.
Which version of the code or inteernal documentation should I be
looking for? And where?

-- hendrik