Zile

Forum: Apps
Topic: Zile
started by: John

Posted by John on Jan. 29 2004,04:10

Anyone use it?

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 30 2004,04:40

Not me.

I once was a minimally capable emacs user back in the day, but nowadays I can't even remember what CTL-X CTL-C does.

Posted by ou_ryperd on Jan. 30 2004,05:20

Nope.

Posted by hasty on Jan. 30 2004,17:42

Posted by TyphoonMentat on Jan. 30 2004,19:33

Looks like it's out for 0.5.4 then

Posted by catfish on Jan. 30 2004,21:10

oops, just about missed this post...
I do use it (its a great emacs clone).

Posted by Ajp on Jan. 31 2004,01:36

No. I prefer Nano instead.

Posted by libretto on Jan. 31 2004,23:42

Same here, I like Nano.

Posted by John on Feb. 01 2004,01:54

Nothing is decided yet, but I was considering removing one of the four text editors down the road -- just testing the waters.

Posted by Sodki on Feb. 02 2004,13:56

just got my first 50 mb cds today - it's a pain in the arse to get them in portugal - and this is my first post.

i've beem using DSL for a while and zile is my favourite text editor, but i don't know how much space is involved if you remove it and i wouldn't mind if you replace it with another wacko-crazy-little-app.

i use DSL mostly for pc diagnosis.

Posted by sjborch on Feb. 26 2004,00:21

Noooooo! Don't take Zile away! I use it instead of emacs. I hope it's not too large. It's even easier to use than emacs. I've heard that CE supposed to be small, as it used to be on tomsrtbt floppy-disk linux, but he removed it with version 2.03.

I prefer vi and its clones, but I'm trying to learn emacs as well since the key bindings are similar for many of the older applications, like 'info' pages.

Posted by John on Feb. 26 2004,00:32

Okay, Zile stays.

Posted by Grim on April 04 2004,12:47

Calling emacs (or one of it's derivatives) a text editor is like calling the USS Nimitz a rowboat. That thing's a web browser, email client, IRC client...it's practically an operating system (and I vote you kick it to the curb, long live vi!).

Posted by hasty on April 04 2004,21:35

Jolly well put . Death to emacs.

It could always be an optional script install.

Posted by cbagger01 on April 05 2004,17:46

How much space are we talking about here?

Emacs is really powerful and a must-have for the 3 people left on Earth who remember how to use it.

Seriously, zile is probably a great tool for a certain kind of user base. However, this user base is definately not the point-n-click crowd like myself.

So if it doesn't take up a lot of space it should be kept. Otherwise... well, you get the idea.

Posted by Grim on April 06 2004,04:25

I agree, emacs is really powerful--after much user customization. When switching from system to system, you either have to:
A.) Transfer your Emacs customization files (macros, et al.) or
B.) Be proficient enough with the vanilla install to get some work done. Plus with all of the add-ons that most emacs users accumlate over time (see above post) emacs more closely resembles an operating system than a mere text editor.

Conversly, vi is:
A.) Ready to go out of the box---makes more sense for a liveCD distribution, no need to carry around a USB key full of emacs customizations.
B.) Fast--Vi was programmed to be usable over a 300 baud modem connection!
c.) Small--Compared to the bloat that is emacs, vi is the hands-down winner for a stripped down OS.

Quote

"The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens." --Bill Joy, Linux Magazine 1999

Posted by Dan on April 06 2004,17:26

Zile is not bloated, it is about 88k, smaller than nano and nvi.

Posted by cbagger01 on April 06 2004,17:35

I may be dating myself here, but I've used emacs over a 300 baud modem connection. Nothing compares to watching those letters scroll by at a rate slower than your ability to read them. It's kinda like watching those scrolling ticker messages on a billboard at a street corner in New York City.

Actually, I far more often used emacs from a 1200 baud modem connection or from a 9600 baud serial VT220 console. In addition to doing simple word proccessing, I used it for e-mail and for Usenet news reading (the World Wide Web as it is today did not exist yet so I did not use it to browse the web), and my CS friends used it as a C language development environment. Emacs works, but the key point is that the emacs configuration files were stored on a central UNIX server and the users were logging in remotely via a terminal emulator.

DSL is a read-only liveCD UNIX-like OS and the individual user would need to store his/her configuration files somewhere, like a hard drive, a network share, a flash drive or on the CD-R itself.

If I recall correctly, the user-specific config files weren't very large considering that they were plain text and our user accounts had a small quota ( < 1.0 MB) and they were nowhere near taking up a large portion of that quota.

I'm more interested in knowing the size of the application itself. If it's a few megs then my preference is to deep-six it. If it's only a few hundred KB then the cost-benefit ratio is a little closer to 1 : 1 and we shouldn't automatically dump it. Instead, it depends on the usefulness of the replacement application.

Posted by Dan on April 07 2004,04:27

Cbagger01, you must have missed my last post, Zile is rather small.