RE: folding in editors

["Tony Gore" <Tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Macromedia (now Adobe, but formerly Allaire before it became part of Macromedia) have an editor called Homesite that supports folding. By default, it folds on HTML tags

 

I think you may be able to change it to work on user defined tags.

 

This editor I think developed into that used in Dreamweaver. There is a feature called the "tag inspector" which allows you to manipulate nested tags.

 

And yes, it does meet Ian's test.

 

Tony Gore

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From: owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ian East
Sent: 14 December 2006 17:23
To: Barry Cook
Cc: Occam Family
Subject: Re: Inline VALOF

On 14 Dec 2006, at 16:18, Barry Cook wrote:

We have a fundamental problem in having a large number of things to express and insisting on being limited to a monochrome, latin alphabet.

We all asked for a bit more, but got Unicode, in a dozen different flavours.  Modest lumps of UTF-16 i feel add a lot, without too much pressure on input devices.  Have adopted UTF-16 for Honeysuckle, but only to add a smackerel (like ≤ and ≥).

I guess this is partly because we use text editors and simple keyboards. I've not been at all impressed by the productivity of graphics input systems (drag and drop is so slow compared to touching a key or two).

Text editors manage well IMHO.  It's the keyboards that are limited.  Maybe there's a market for an additional keypad for those extra unicode tidbits.

I wonder if there is some intermediate, maybe a more flexible display (colour, more symbols) and extended keyboard use - I guess ctrl-... is fairly well used by the OS and Applications for shortcuts but ESC-... might offer some possibilities (it was originally intended to be used this way but got a bit hijacked somewhere - Unix?). Of course we might need extended editors

I always hated having to recall keyboard combinations.  It would never prove popular.  Take emacs commands for example - much hated by every student on my C course.

(what happened to folding? - I don't see much mention of it, even though it is available in Emacs, ...).

I recently looked into this.  Best of the bunch seemed to be FE and jEdit, but NONE I could find treated a fold as a logical unit the way F did.  My test was to fold a block, indent it, and unfold.  If the indent applied to entire content then it would pass.  Most useful here is to comment an arbitrary block out.  Only F did these things (unless someone out there has found something else!). F IS still around as an exe, but all source seems to have vapourised.  Can find neither time nor student to write a substitute.

Cheers

Ian