Re: [MacPerl] beginner's q...

[robinmcf@altern.org]

>Most people who use BBEdit Lite enjoy things like better keyboard shortcut
>support, line numbers, column numbers, search and replace, viewing of
>invisibles, handling of arbitrarily large text (memory permitting), plugins
>(to some degree), scriptability, etc.  You may not have found those
>features valuable.  Others do.

Just as there is a reason to have a non lite version (ie extra functions that make your life easier) I also found it necessary to find an alternative to BBedit lite. Once again I underline Alpha was (for me) able to supply the features you mention above (plus others BBedit didn't have - self pairing brackets and braces (type one get one free), colour coding, the ability to map any key combination of your choice to any function, macros, extendability along the lines of MPW) as well as interacting with MacPerl (which at the time BBedit didn't do).


>But the point I meant to refer to was the part about "free speech as in a
>dictatorship".  Bare Bones is under no obligation to give away BBEdit in
>any form, and BBEdit Lite is a very nice tool for costing nothing, and I
>thought your comment about dictatorship was unfair and inflammatory.

Inflammatory comments aside, I don't think BareBones is entirely altruistic in it's motives for releasing  BBedit Lite, much in the same way Micro$oft wasn't entirely altruistic in unleashing a free web browser. Not that I'm suggesting BBedit hopes to rule the world, it *is* a commercial strategy however that provokes their beneficence, they hope people will like their  lite version enough to buy the expensive heavy one. BBedit ‚ Mother Teresa of Calcutta.


>I would not want an editor written in Perl.  I'd rather have an editor
>written in C (or C++, Pascal, Objective C, etc.) with Perl hooks. 

Hmm sorry I've been reading too many Perl books and not enough MacPerl it seems.