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I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second curs
by tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second cursor" around and then pressing a key it would paste the current character in the "copy cursor" at your current location
This would make it really easy to do something like duplicate a line while changing some things, just move the copy cursor to the line/variable/thing you wanted to paste and modify, then hold the copy key until you got to where you had to change something (at your current location the characters from the other line would appear), type what you wanted, then back to the copy key for the rest of the line
Seeing my best friend at the time use it it seemed really cool, some days I think of trying to write a minor mode for emacs that lets you do that...
- the-dude 10y agoThe copy/paste function was already there in the Beeb and the Electron.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y agoreally? interesting, wonder why it seems no other editor has something similar, or at least I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere
- jacquesm 10y agoYes, confirmed the bbc and the electron already had this. Interesting tidbit: it matched the data on the screen with the font in graphics mode, which meant that if your graphics intersected anywhere with text you wanted to copy that it stopped copying on corrupted characters. There was too little memory in those machines to keep a 'backup copy' of what was in the character cells of the screen, so the copy key function had to recover the screen contents directly. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micro.jpeg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micr... You can see the keyboard here, the copy key is bottom row, rightmost key.
- astrobe_ 10y agoVim has a limited form of this: control-E and control-Y in insert mode copy the character on the previous/next line (both in Emacs/Vim look for extensions about "multiple cursors" if you're interested in this feature). I remember the line editor of the CPC used to edit Basic programs also had this feature.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y agoI use multiple cursors in Emacs all the time, but it's a really different workflow from this type of editor, with this it's like having two independent cursors, one for insert and one for "copy from here", you can switch between the two and move them around (don't remember if you could search on the copy cursor, but it would make sense you could) when you press the copy key they both move 1 char to the right and the char from the copy cursor ends up at the insert cursor, in skilled hands this can make some typical coding "copy this line and modify it slightly" quite fast Really surprised it didn't catch on in other editors, I wonder if it could be done in emacs by having a command that copies a char from mark to point and moves them both right, as well as a different cursor to put in mark, since you can already exchange point and mark it seems this should make this functionality feasible
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoThis copy and paste mechanism was also part of the Amstrad CPC (the first computer I've personally owned), with shift + cursor keys you could move the second cursor and there was the "copy" key. http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:CPC_464_old_logo_bilgisayarlarim.jpg http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:CPC_464_old_logo_bilgis...
- tetraodonpuffer 10y agothanks for the additional data point, interesting that this was so widespread but ended up more or less disappearing as a copy/paste paradigm