Anyone use ELSE minor-mode in Emacs?

[John J Lee]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, [iso-8859-1] François Pinard wrote:
[...]
> To quickly check that it works, once in the new Vim, try:
>
>   :py print 3 + 5
>
> and you should see `8' in the bottom line.

Thanks.

BTW, one question I forgot to ask, which is maybe the most important from
my point of view: how do your fingers like vi?  Mine have never been
completely happy with the standard emacs keys, but I don't like to change
them.  I keep meaning to give the vi keys a chance, but it's almost like
learning to type again...


> > I'm currently thinking of ditching pine (for something, like pine,
> > that's cross-platform, does IMAP well, is free (beer) but also libre,
> > has a decent disconnected mode, preferably written in a high-level
> > language, and that doesn't offer remote buffer overflows on its
> > feature list!... except such a beast doesn't seem to exist).
>
> Gnus was really marvelous, nothing can really compare with it.  I looked

[some of below is on-topic, promise ;-]

I use it for news (apart from now, since I got this as email, not news).
Does it do good disconnected IMAP, I wonder?  Very very few programs seem
to do that *useably* (for my habits, anyway).  KMail seems to be growing
support for that, but it's very new.


> around a bit for a replacement, and the best I came with is Mutt.  I
> did not consider Pine for long, but do not remember why I excluded it.

I've used it (pine) for almost ten years (never seriously used anything
else), and it's nice, but:

- weird non-libre-ish licence, pain to install on Debian
- written in C: improvements are slow to arrive (especially given the
   weird license and "cathedral-style" development system), and the
   usual overflows
- recent remote send-email-to-become-root overflow exploits!
- offline and disconnected-mode support is poor to non-existent (bad if
  you use a modem)


> Getting Mutt and some of my Python scripts to really cooperate required
> some doing, and a few kludges, and I still feel very far from having a
> mail agent offering Python as an extension language.  I also saw Python

There's Mahogany, but it's GUI-based (dunno if the keyboard support is
good, which my hands regard as essential).  I'm also not sure if the
Python support is actually stable.


> extensible mail agents, but which had some weakness in the underlying
> mail engine, so far that I could judge.

Yes, it seems like it's bound to be one of those things that are messy
enough to take years of bug fixes to get really right.  I once
contemplated writing a clone of pine in Python, but I expect it's just too
much work to seriously consider.  With Barry Warsaw's email module being
used by Mailman (Barry again, of course), I suppose that takes care of
*some* of the mess, but far from all.  And the names "pyne" and "balsa"
are already taken <0.5 wink> ("twig", maybe?  "stick"?  "needle"?  No, of
course, it'd have to be "larch"!-).

[...]
> it.  In my case at least, the big move is now part of the past, the main
> suffering is behind.

You talk like an ex-drug addict ;-)


> > | I still have no idea on the Vim capabilities for controlling highlighting
>
> > I've always thought the way to do this must be to allow both simple
> > high-level language (elisp, python) ways of doing this for covering the
> > broad range of languages &c., and some kind of low-level (C, I guess)
> > plugin standard for wiring up editors to things like the Python parser.
> > Who wants to reimplement the Python parser, after all?
>
> This is about editing SGML, isn't it?  I wrote something for Emacs
[...]

Yes, but not only SGML.  python-mode has quirks (I suppose mostly to do
with things other than syntax colouring -- paragraph-fill, for example)
that could be fixed with proper parsing rather than (I presume) the bunch
of regexes that python-mode gets by with.  If Mark Hammonds Windows editor
does it, I don't see why Emacs and vi shouldn't.


John