[TxMt] opening a file readonly

Harold W. Schranz Harold.Schranz at anu.edu.au
Tue Jul 24 03:09:04 UTC 2007


Cliff Pruitt wrote:
> I'm honestly not putting down the desire for the feature, it's just
> not an "expected" feature in an editor.  Am I making sense?

Not really ... I think a read-only mode should be a standard feature  
of any serious editor. Just consider past examples e.g. vi, Emacs,  
Edt,  possibly even TECO (but my memory fails me here; digression:  
TECO is probably the most powerful/dangerous/sparse/delightfully  
cryptic text (character) editor that's ever existed; Emacs used to be  
written in it).

On Jul 19, 2007, at 11:30 AM, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> I think you've missed the point Cliff. There are all sorts of reasons
> why you'd want to open a document read-only. Other editors have great
> r/o support (vim/gvim springs to mind). In general just because you
> don't want to change the document doesn't mean you don't want to work
> with it in a familiar user interface will all the syntax highlighting,
> clever selection modes, folding etc that TextMate brings.

I would agree with Andy here ... I often work with multiple (source)  
files open and it would highly inefficient/clumsy to use a different  
application for reading as well as deal with the unexpected  
consequences of entering stray characters into a source file ...  
(leading to new but likely less useful permutations of code ...).

Harry.





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