Re: [Nano-devel] updates (yes, I'm still alive...)

[David Lawrence Ramsey]

Jordi Mallach wrote:

<snip>

>>>How many letters are left?
>>
>>After the above change, two: Meta-U and Meta-Q.  (I would have preferred
>>Meta-U and Meta-E, for "Undo" and "Redo" whenever they get in, but I
>>couldn't think of a description for --tabstospaces that involved the
>>letter Q.  Maybe Meta-- and Meta-+ could work?)
>
>Hmm, we're starving, as I feared. Yes, saving E and U for undo/redo
>would be excellent.
>
>Regarding Q, if you think about it, it's not so important that the meta
>is a letter included in the description. That would be en locale
>dependant anyway.

True; I was just trying to be consistent.[1]  Besides, I like having the
command line option and the toggle use the same letter when possible. 
Given the precedent of Meta-X as the no-help toggle (which Pico calls
"expert mode"), though, I've changed the toggle.  I've left the command
command line option alone, though.  -Q is already used in a
Pico-compatible way, and -q is used by Pico for a termcap-specific
option that doesn't apply to nano.

Actually, Meta-Q is consistent in one way: QBasic, along with MS-DOS
Editor, was infamous for turning all tabs into spaces, as I found out
when trying to edit a Makefile with the latter.[2]  If we could justify
the Meta-O toggle for Mac file format by thinking of MacOS or Mac OS X
(as in a changelog entry for nano 1.1.2), then this can certainly work.

[1] I figure that if I don't, nano'll end up like Emacs in terms of
really weird keystrokes, e.g. cutting a block of text by using
Ctrl-Space at the beginning and Ctrl-W at the end, and copying it by
using Meta-W instead of Ctrl-W.  Or is it the other way around?  This is
why I don't use Emacs.

[2] And before that, of course, there was edlin, which wasn't too bad
once you learned the most basic commands, but which required you to
manually swap parts of large files into memory in order to edit them
(since MS-DOS lacked virtual memory and couldn't do that itself), which
I still couldn't get it to do after half an hour of trying once, using
some of the most obtuse one-letter commands I've ever had the misfortune
of dealing with.  This is why I don't use ed or ex/vi.