Re: Emacs: a 21st century text-editor

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Christopher G D Tipper" <chris.tipper@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 20:04:02 -0000
> 
> 1 Text-wrapping. Text wrapping is a limitation, and it would be nice
>   to scroll past the edge of the screen. This is particularly acute in
>   my case editing XSLT scripts where line-breaks become a
>   presentational issue. Sometimes I actually need to compose documents
>   with 250 columns, and I don't appreciate emacs telling me otherwise.

I'm not sure I understand what is your complaint here: would setting
truncate-lines and/or truncate-partial-width-windows to non-nil do
what you want?  If not, why not?

> 2 Shell open. Emacs really ought to be able recognise when the shell
>   is requesting it to open a file. Gnu-client should be unnecessary in
>   a modern application.

Can you suggest a more-or-less portable interface that Emacs can use
to implement such a feature?

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by ``shell is requesting to open a
file'' -- can you give an example?

> 3 Tabbed buffers. Open buffers should be easily visible in a tabbed
>   layout below the menu, in the manner of XEmacs. A proper history
>   list would help here so that documents are persistent across
>   sessions.

desktop.el gives you the latter of the two features.

> 4 File Dialogs. I use dlgopen.el on Windows, which gets rid of the
>   most serious interface issue of all, the lack of modern file
>   dialogs.

Again, I don't understand: Emacs already uses file dialogs (the ones
provided by the toolkit used to build Emacs) when you invoke find-file
via a mouse click (e.g., File->Open from the menu bar).  What is
exactly the problem here?

> 5 Paste replaces edit. This idea that when I paste I end up with both
>   the replacement text and the old text does not belong in the modern
>   idiom.

delete-selection-mode will give you this, I think.