Re: [Sheflug] vi, emacs, sharp sticks

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris J/#6 <sixie [at] nccnet.co.uk> writes:

    Chris> you can't beat just going <ESC>:%!sort to filter the file 

In Emacs you have the choice between M-! sort (save 2 or 3 keystrokes
;-) and M-x sortlines, depending on whether the file is already loaded
into a buffer or not.  What I like in Emacs though is the ability to
run such commands on a region.

I actually mostly use external commands like this:

C-SPC C-x C-x ; create a trivial region
C-u M-|       ; filter region through pipe and replace it with output
cd /coda/Projects/XEmacs/21.2-HEAD && cvs diff -U 0 src/ChangeLog
   && cvs diff src/emacs.c RET

and mail it off to the patch list.  But you can do things like

C-x h C-u M-| xpm2pnm|pnm2png ; select all, replace region from pipe
C-x C-w out.png RET

This is more useful when the transformation is applied to _part_ of
the buffer; saving the file and running the command externally doesn't
work then, except for some specially designed programs like patch that
ignore extraneous text.

The main advantage to Emacs is that it's mostly modeless (as somebody
pointed out, vi users terminate text with RET ESC, not just RET), and
even inside command entry you use the same commands recursively.  It's
possible to run Gnus recursively in a command buffer!  But ....  ;-)

For the information of Emacs fans who may not have seen these things
yet; vi users won't be impressed.  :-)

-- 
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