Re: VMS editor uncommon option

On 11/4/2024 6:19 AM, Marc Van Dyck wrote:

Arne Vajhøj was thinking very hard :

So I did a first attempt on DCL, VMS Pascal and VMS Basic
support.
>
https://www.vajhoej.dk/arne/vmsstuff/jedit/
>
has some instructions in content.txt and a
jedit-bundle.zip with everything.
>
Not everybody likes JEdit, but modern GUI editors
for VMS is not exactly a crowded space. :-)

 A naïve question : I have never been exposed, I must admit, to "modern
GUI editors". What more do they have to offer compared to, for example,
good old DECWindows LSE (with EDT keypad of course) ? Could you try to
convince me ?

I don't know if I can convince you that JEdit is great.
Maybe I can convince you that it is worth trying out.
First a caveat. I don’t have much experience with LSE. I have seen both
the VT interface and the DECWindows interface. But I never liked LSE. I
was always an EVE person on VMS. My clear impression is that LSE was a
good product in its time, but it has not evolved for 30+ years.
Next the editor vs IDE discussion. I see it more as scale than as two
buckets. So if I were to put various editors/IDE's on the scale it
would be:
editor <------------------------------------> IDE
EDT    EVE   JEdit    LSE     VSCode      Eclipse
Nice features in JEdit:
* Support multiple horizontal and vertical split of screen.
* Syntax coloring for a ton of languages - both old and new.
* The BufferTabs plugin (as opposed to the builtin buffer switcher) is
   pretty nice for working with lots of open files.
* The JDiff plugin makes it easy to see difference in two files
   side by side with color highlighting.
* Can read and write files in all sorts of encodings.
* Can convert tab characters to spaces.
* Bracket matching.
* Smart indent.
* The XML plugin does nice auto complete for XML and HTML
* There is a FTP/SFTP plugin to allow access to remote files. I have
   never liked that though - I always prefer to edit locally and then
   FTP/SFTP.
* Anyone that has used a recent editor/IDE/wordprocessor on PC can
   use JEdit. It comes with documentation, but there is really
   no reason to read it. Menus, icons, right click context menu are
   mostly as expected. I probably only use 20% of the functionality -
   lots left to investigate, but if I need something I find it in the
   menus.
* Same UI on Windows, Linux, VMS, macOS, FreeBSD etc. (on
   Windows and various *nix there are lots of editors to pick from,
   but on VMS the offerings are more limited)
There may not be many "must have" features, but I think there are a lot
of "nice to have" features.
Not so nice things with JEdit:
* Slow startup time – so keep it open and close and open files
   from within.
* Rather ugly font.
* Default RFM is STMLF not VAR.
But besides all the objective pros and cons then editor choice also has
a significant subjective aspect – some may love it – some may hate it.
If you are in the market for a graphical editor on VMS, then it seems
obvious to give JEdit a try and see if you like it or not. Worst case
is that you don’t like it and you have wasted an hour or two of
your time.
Arne