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by trn 1578 days ago
Using Carsten Kunze's actively maintained continuation of Gunnar Ritter's (outstanding) traditional ex/vi project is highly recommended. See https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/.

The parent project on SourceForge hasn't had any activity for 15 years, nor a release in 17+ years, and contains various known bugs, all of which are fixed in Carsten Kunze's project.
1 comments
mst 1576 days ago
That sounds like a better idea for everybody who isn't me.

Naturally I've accumulated a few local patches over the years so I'll have to figure out which of them are obsoleted by the improvements in that version and which of them I want to port first ;)

(thanks very much for sharing that this exists though, I shall be digging in when I have available tuits)

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trn 1576 days ago
It should be simple, mostly fixes and no major features or refactoring.
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mst 1576 days ago
I also ported it to use malloc instead of treating the heap as a single giant array, though a quick look suggests they did it rather more competently (though admittedly given my C code that's really not a high bar to clear).

I suspect that once I untangle my somewhat hacky version of that the remainder of my patches will apply just fine but there'll still be at least a bit of mental effort involved.

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trn 1576 days ago
Do you have a summary of those changes or a repo up anywhere? If they are general-purpose you might consider sending a PR upstream to n-t-roff
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mst 1572 days ago
A little late replying here, sorry.

Probably nothing that interesting - the malloc stuff was the big change and n-t-roff already did a much better job of it than I did.

But if there's anything in the remaining stack once I've backed it out that seems useful I'll be sure to PR it - even if it doesn't make it in to mainline it seems as good a way to memorialise the patch for other people's use as anything else.

(the repo is currently private because gritter had politely requested nobody make it work on windows and one of my patches worked around a cygwin bug - given the advent of WSL I doubt anybody would want that one anyway so I expect to let it be lost to time along with the half-arsed malloc code)

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roytam87 1576 days ago
It will be nice to see your efforts publicly.
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