[GSoC] About the idea: Unicode support in vi

[Bernd Walter]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 03:55:12AM -0500, Zhihao Yuan wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Paul Schenkeveld <freebsd at psconsult.nl> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 08:20:07PM -0500, Zhihao Yuan wrote:
> >> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I like the idea of adding Unicode support to nvi but I hate the idea of
> > replacing nvi in the base system by something else.  I've been there
> > before, when administering a heterogenous environment with Unix, BSD and
> > Linux systems, being a heavy user of vi, it's frustrating if commands in
> > various versions of vi do not behave *exactly* the same, e.g. different
> > versions of vi leave the cursor in different places after undo, the
> > effect of the repeat command (.) after an undo command, the availability
> > or not to do something like /pattern/z. to find and position the found
> > text in the middle of the screen so you can immediately see the context.
> >
> > Administering hundreds of FreeBSD systems at various sites would become
> > a nightmare if frequently used utilities in the base system do not
> > behave exactly the same between different builds, a true POLA violation
> > I think.  I truly hope that adding unicode to nvi doesn't change the
> > behaviour of nvi, at least not when not using actually Unicode.
> 
> I will improve nvi only, and I won't break the traditional functions.
> But your words reminds me that, perhaps the move of cursor is a
> problem for a mbytes-enabled vi. We will see.

It especially is if characters are double wide on output, which happens
at least with some chinese ones.

I really hope you will find a mentor soon enough.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.