Elmer UI

[Mark S. Miller]

At 11:32 AM 12/7/98 , Bill Frantz wrote:
>What I miss the most in Elmer is the ability to recall blocks of text,
>modify them, and then re-execute them.  Macintosh Programmer's Workshop
>(MPW) has one approach to the problem where you edit previous lines, and
>when you are ready to run them, you highlight them and hit enter (N.B.
>enter != return).  This approach has the disadvantage that the transcript
>no longer shows you what you did.

[-] Elmer does exactly this.
Elmer is a full bad-but-adequate Notepad-like text editor, so you can go
back and edit those previous lines.  When you want to execute them, rather
than highlight, position the insertion point at the end of the last line
and hit return, as if you had just typed this line as a command line.

Elmer likewise has the same disadvantage you explain about MPW.


>The big knock on MPW is the same as the knock on emacs.  Both of them are
>private worlds which gratuitously ignore existing UI conventions from other
>systems.

Elmer uses the text editing conventions it inherits from Swing.  On
startup, it tells Swing to use the look and feel of the current platform,
so Elmer is as L&F compatible with the platform as Swing is, which isn't
great, but which should improve with time.  I'd guess Javasoft considers
this a high priority.  As it's not rocket science, just a lot of work, I
think they'll succeed at it.