Two column editing

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

I discovered inadvertently the existence of two columns editing mode by hitting 
F2 while working in emacs.

As I did not understand what I was seeing on the screen, I checked what F2 was 
assigned to and discovered that two-column edit mode.

The emacs manual section about two columns editing does not seem to correspond 
to what I am seeing, so I'd like to confirm that I'm not missing something.

1) I open a TSV file
2) I put point at the right of the TAB character that separates my two columns
3) I hit C-x 6 s

What I see (in the recent tab mode) is:

1) The name of the buffer of the original file, on the right of my tab bar
2) The newly created 2C/<original file name> buffer
3) That buffer is empty

What I expected to see:

A split window with

- A left-hand buffer that contains the left-hand column
- A right-hand buffer that contains the right-hand column

On the user list, Emanuel Berg suggested that I look at the code to find 
examples. I see that the code dates from 1992 and that it seems to have been 
included to handle bilingual aligned texts (the example is a bilingual aligned 
Esperanto/English explanation of the mode).

I tried the same with emacs -nw and found a similar behavior.

First question: what am I missing ?


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune