Re: Input line editing

[Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost>]

On Fri 13 Feb 2009 at 12:27:52 -0600, David Young wrote:
>  (I'm borrowing and twisting ideas
> from FISH---"Finally an Intelligent SHell"---and some of Jef Raskin's
> creations, including the Canon Cat and The Humane Interface, "THE".)
> Let 'edit --cmdline interpreter' start your favorite editor,
> which creates a blank workspace and starts the command interpreter
> named by 'interpreter', which may be sh or mysql.  Type a command,
> select it, invoke the editor command that sends the selection to the
> command interpreter: your editor interpolates the command's output on
> the line underneath your command, and it makes that output the new
> selection.  Delete the output, edit the output, type a new command, or
> edit the previous command and re-evaluate.

What you describe looks really similar to Apple's Programmers Workbench
(APW) which is from the 1990's or so. In turn, APW looks remarkably
like a spruced up version of Commodore screen editors from the PET,
VIC-20, 64, etc.: you could move your cursor around the whole screen,
overtype and insert whereever you want, and the line on which you hit
RETURN gets executed (or, if it starts with a line number, added to your
BASIC program). The output (if any) from the command overwrites the text
that was already present below the command.

The new aspects that APW introduces is that the output is inserted, and
that you're editing a document much larger than your screen/window.

Too bad there is no year on that FISH paper (but from the references it
seems it can't be earlier than 1999), but that aspect of it is certainly
not new.

> Dave
-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert    -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl      -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.