Since "the" editor is not under active development, I'm wondering if you might consider "tinkering" with VUE (my favorite editor). I'd love to have the ability to search "up" a file as well as "down."

I may have raised this question before, and you may have told me to forget the idea, but if so I can't find a record of that exchange, so here's the request again.

And, it would also be nice to be able to see the last line label encountered in any search as the top line of the display (replacing one line of content).

I decided to move this post to the 6.1 forum, since although it isn't obviously a candidate for a major new feature, it would nonetheless end up in 6.1, if anywhere, and might also stimulate ideas about editor development in general.

To answer your question, yes you have raised it before, and I probably gave you a noncommittal response, perhaps like I'm doing now: Yes, I'll consider it.

I agree that it would be a useful feature. It would also be useful to upgrade the search to support regular expressions. I've looked at it a couple of times, but never quite had the gumption to dive in (since the code is rather complex, and ancient). I would alter your request displaying the last line slightly though, to put it on the top status line (rather than the top line of content), and to show the name of the procedure or function rather than the last label (when applicable).

The larger question is how to prioritize minor enhancements like this to a component that is in some ways long obsolete (at least compared to modern GUI editors). On the one hand, I recognize that the continuous incremental improvement model, that we've followed for all these years, is generally well appreciated. And obsolete or not, many people still depend on VUE as their primary program editor. So it falls under the heading of common sense to continue making enhancements that improve programming productivity.

On the other hand, there is the question of whether it would make more sense to redirect such resources towards a more powerful editor, if not The Editor (which I and a few others continue to recognize and use as a great improvement over VUE in many areas, despite the questions about its on-going status), then perhaps some other editor that can be configured to support A-Shell/Basic more directly.

As one example/possibility, we might consider Eclipse. (Stephen Funkhouser was looking into that awhile back, but I think that project got sidelined by another one.) One great thing about Eclipse is that works on multiple platforms. (Although it should be noted that you can work around the Windows-only limitation of editors like The Editor through a variety of means, including old-fashioned network file sharing.) It is also reasonably well-known, increasing the chance of acceptance by some hypothetical programmer who might be lucky enough to stumble into our world.

But there are plenty of other possibilities, probably more than there are active developers in the A-Shell world. (Which addresses what may be the core reason why we haven't invested a bunch of effort into any one of them.) And although it would be a lot of work to make any editor understand A-Shell/Basic in the way that The Editor does, it probably wouldn't be much effort (for anyone) to configure any of the leading choices to be much better than VUE, except for the (questionable benefit of) keystroke compatibility. So maybe it is worth

In particular, four big enhancements that are readily available in most modern editors:

1) color syntax highlighting
2) multiple files/windows open at same time
3) much better search capabilities
4) integration with the compiler

On the last point, many program-oriented editors support the ability to shell out to a compiler command, and to read back the results from a comma-delimited file so that the editor can highlight/jump to the lines with syntax errors. COMPIL.EXE fits nicely into this model.

Given the diversity of possible paths forward (improve VUE, re-engineer/adopt The Editor, configure/adapt some other editor, or let everyone do it themselves), this would be a worthwhile discussion to have face to face with the leading developers around a table, with examples/demos available for show-and-tell. Call it Battle of the Editors. (Another reason to come to the Conference in October!)

In the meantime it would be good to hear some other input.

As someone who tried, but could not get "The Editor" to work for him (in A-Shell Linux) nor find the necessary time to work out the kinks, all of the improvements you suggest (particularly improved search capabilities) would be very valuable if made in native VUE. That is, they should neither require A-Shell Windows nor ATE. Likewise (for us), any alternative editor that you develop should be able to run directly in Linux or through a telnet front-end like AlphaLAN.

Your items 2 (multiple open files) and 3 (improved search) combined would provide one of the most useful improvements - the ability to find and/or replace specific text in a limited group of files at the same time.

The order I would be interested in would be 2, 3, 4, then 1.

You must mean... 2, tapioca, 3, 4, 1.... :p

No, tapioca would be first

I just stumbled onto Jack's response to my original query, which I thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And now I'm wondering if I missed any sort of editor competition at the conference.

I don't care about any of the proposed four enhancements, I'll be happy with a reverse search and think the idea of putting the last procedure or function name on the top status line is just fine.

I only use A-Shell to run (and test) my application. I do 95% of my editing in a LINUX (bash) shell, which gives me instant access to grep and other tools I've developed. I have three monitors on my desk, and can have more files open at a time than I can keep track of. I don't need color cues to help me find syntax errors.

I'm not sure that any decisions were arrived at regarding editors at the Conference. (If there were, someone please remind me!)

Eclipse seems like the most promising choice, but teaching it to understand A-Shell/Basic will be a very significant undertaking, and hardly anyone is using it now, so prospects for a migration to it in the near future are pretty flimsy. Given that, perhaps it wouldn't be a total waste of time to add a few improvements to VUE. (In fact, I just added one last week - the DEFAULT extension list now supports up to 25 extensions! Yeah!)

What I would find handy is an Undo function. Every once in a while I do something really stupid after a lot of edits and need to Q out and start over.

FYI, ^S^O will retrieve the last deleted line, and ^C will restore the original version of the line you are currently messing up, but I suspect you're in need of more "undo" than that. Unfortunately, it's not a simple thing to add (and is a good example of the kind of feature that is standard in modern GUI editors).

I thought it would be difficult but I thought I would mention it. Luckily it doesn't happen that often.