vi Alternative Required

[Jay Maynard]

In article <joshi.660533000 at m.cs.uiuc.edu> joshi at cs.uiuc.edu (Anil Joshi) writes:
>Is it that difficult to change vi to emulate ISPF? If so, may be
>emacs can do the job (may be a tad slowly).

I seriously doubt that either vi or emacs could be made to emulate the ISPF
editor, much less perform the other functions that ISPF does. TSO programmers
spend more of their time in ISPF than emacs users spend inside emacs. It has
an astonishingly rich set of functions, and doing them all would be quite a
task. Even the editor is markedly different from the typical Unix screen-
oriented text editor; it's a cross between a screen editor and a line editor,
and some things are more easily done as line commands (entered in fields at
the beginning of each line) than as functions in the text portion of each
screen. The model of interaction with ISPF was designed around the
capabilities of the 3270-series CRTs instead of character-at-a-time async
terminals.

The original poster will be better advised to use dte, a WordStar-like editor
that appeared recently in comp.binaries.ibm.pc - but with Unix source as well.
-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmaynard at thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu  | adequately be explained by stupidity.
  "...flames are a specific art form of Usenet..." -- Gregory C. Woodbury