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The Craft of Text Editing (Paperback)

by Craig A. Finseth (Author) "In its most general form, text editing is the process of taking some input, changing it, and producing some output..." (more)
Key Phrases: echo negotiation, extra shift keys, incremental redisplay, Point Move, Back Space, Apple Macintosh (more...)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This book covers all aspects of creating a character-based text editor. In the process, it discusses many aspects of creating a large application program including user interface, speed/memory/I/O tradeoffs, and many other considerations.

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.

Product Details

Paperback: 228 pages
Publisher: Lulu.com; 3rd edition (March 17, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1411682971
ISBN-13: 978-1411682979

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,864,091 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
In its most general form, text editing is the process of taking some input, changing it, and producing some output. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
echo negotiation, extra shift keys, incremental redisplay, struct piece, buffer gap, redisplay algorithm, invoked mode, graphical input device, kill ring, modified flag, text being edited, echo area, printing terminals, specified mark, editing model, dispatch table, gap method, current buffer, undo information, buffer line, padding characters, entire buffer, command loop, specified buffer, line wrap

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Point Move, Back Space, Apple Macintosh, Find First Not In Forward, Mark Create, Point To Mark, Carriage Return, Mark Delete, Point Get, Swap Point And Mark

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Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 15 books:

Software Tools by Brian W. Kernighan in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Through the Looking-Glass (Dover Thrift Editions) by Lewis Carroll in Back Matter
The mythical man-month and other essays on software engineering by Frederick P Brooks in Back Matter
True Basic by John G. Kemeny on page 44
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks in Back Matter

See all 15 books this book cites

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6 of 6 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 (Chicagoland, United States) - 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.

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