The Craft of Text Editing: Emacs for the Modern World [Hardcover]

Craig A. Finseth (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0387976167 | ISBN-13: 978-0387976167 | Publication Date: October 1, 1991 | Edition: 1

Never before has a book been published that describes the techniques and technology used in writing text editors, word processors and other software. Written for the working professional and serious student, this book covers all aspects of the task. The topics range from user psychology to selecting a language to implementing redisplay to designing the command set. More than just facts are involved, however, as this book also promotes insight into an understanding of the issues encountered when designing such software. After reading this book, you should have a clear understanding of how to go about writing text editing or word processing software. In addition, this book introduces the concepts and power of the Emacs-type of text editor. This type of editor can trace its roots to the first computer text editor written and is still by far the most powerful editor available.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

What goes into making a large application? What do you need to know about managing data, providing feedback, understanding user input, or organizing commands?

This book covers all of those topics and more. By following the design of a character-based text editor, you will learn what goes into the such programs. In addition, you will fi nd out what these terms have in common:

* buffer
* command
* gap
* key
* linked line
* mark
* Minneapolis
* point
* redisplay
* terminal
* whale(!)

This is the third edition of this classic work. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (October 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387976167
• ISBN-13: 978-0387976167
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,789,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 1st: editor design pattern book; 2nd: Emacs history book, June 28, 2003

By 

Daniel Miller - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Craft of Text Editing: Emacs for the Modern World (Hardcover)

This book is required reading for anyone who intends to write a text editor, tiny or huge, even if the editor is far outside of the Emacs culture. The full range of timeless editor topics are covered, including human-machine interface, design patterns for internal data structures, and historical development of the hard-won truths which we now hold as self-evident about editing text in a text editor or a word-processor. The history is a little biased toward a TECO-only perspective (but then again any historical discussion of any topic inevitably emphasizes the historian's own perspective). In a perfect world, this book would be a Volume One of a two volume set, with the other volume focusing on the text-editing advances made by Multics Emacs with its display optimization techniques and emphasis on Lisp as an extension language for Emacs. But alas, only this TECO-focused volume exists and is out-of-print (on paper) at that.

Finseth is definitely loyal to the buffer-gap and paged buffer-gap design pattern. The buffer-gap family of design patterns are definitely superior to many of the naive approaches used by many people attempting to write an editor.

...

Finseth's and Greenberg's record of the Emacs history together fills in once again what the current momentum of GNU Emacs blots out for us moderns today. What would be truly interesting is to get Finseth, Greenberg, Gosling, and Stallman together to write multiple hundreds more pages in order to expand Finseth's notable achievement discussed here to give the most complete Emacs history from the TECO heritage, the Multics heritage, and the open-source/free(dom)-software heritage.

Please consider this book more of a design-patterns book for editing text than as an Emacs-only book. In fact this is one of the very few books which discusses design-patterns for editing text at all.