On Jul 19, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Pete Siemsen wrote:
Cliff, I think it's probably safe to call Emacs and vim "text editors" :-) It's very useful to view, seach and navigate a huge config file with a text editor, and I prefer to browse readonly files with the same tool that I use to edit files. A few days ago I wrote a TextMate language grammar for Juniper router configs, so now TextMate does syntax highlighting and folding of these config files. It's surprisingly useful.
Pete, Yeah I know what you're saying & of course Emacs & vim are "text editors". :-) But honestly how many "editors" of any kind have a read-only mode? (This is where someone emails me a list of like 3,000 read-only editors & I look like a jerk... happens every time.) It's just a non-standard feature both happen to have. I don't discount that it's useful, I just wanted to pose the question that maybe something else would work. I think it's just comparatively infrequent that the need to to completely prevent the buffer from changing at all. Usually most people have smaller tasks & just "not saving" is sufficient even though that's not your need.
- Cliff