Hacker News

points by MonkeyClub 14 hours ago | 0 comments

OpenBSD also has an Emacs-y non-extensible editor, mg(1):

https://man.openbsd.org/mg

Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.

I've used mg and find it generally useful. It's my default editor pretty much everywhere.

However, the code is a mess, with deliberately cryptic identifiers (e.g., `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`), redundant functions (e.g., `vtputc()` is a strict subset of the behavior of `vtpute()`) and a bunch of other weird choices (e.g., deeply-baked assumptions that one byte == one char == one column, even thought Big5 and ShiftJIS were already a thing when it was written).

I tried adding UTF-8 support to mg a couple years ago and basically gave up.

I'll probably be an atto convert.

[–] Koshkin 10 hours ago

> `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`

Well, sometimes we call the cursor "the dot."

[–] torstenvl 10 hours ago

Literally never heard that prior to hacking on the mg codebase.

[–] kragen 3 hours ago

In GNU Emacs, try running M-: (dot) RET.

I think this alias was an aid to porting Lisp from some other Emacs variant in the 80s that used "dot" instead of "point". Never figured out which. It isn't mg because mg doesn't run Lisp.

[–] pratyahava 5 hours ago

also in sam and acme editors in plan9 os

[–] skydhash 7 hours ago

Emacs called it “point” which is not as far. The cursor is just the visible widget.

[–] SoftTalker 14 hours ago

Also available for most linux distros as a package.

[–] rfmoz 9 hours ago

mg is nice, but I miss the colored text