ISPF Edit

[philiprbrenan]

Ash reminds me strongly of the splendid and venerable ISPF editor:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=ispf-editor

One of the major features of this editor is that you could enter commands into the line numbers column, such as d5 to delete the next five lines or r4 to repeat the current line 4 times. Can I interest you in adding these useful row commands to Ash?

i
    Insert a line
Enter
    Press Enter without entering anything to escape insert mode
i5
    Obtain five input lines
d
    Delete a line
d5
    Delete five lines
dd/dd
    Delete a block of lines
r
    Repeat a line
rr/rr
    Repeat a block of lines
c
    With a or b: Copy a line after or before
c5
    With a or b: Copy five lines after or before
cc/cc
    With a or b: Copy a block of lines after or before
m
    Move lines. As with copy commands, m5, mm/mm and use with a or b are also valid commands.
x
    Exclude a line 

[akashnag]

My objective behind creating ash was to create a terminal text editor alternative to notepad++, visual studio code, etc. which gets you the job done with as less fancy key shortcuts as possible, so that average users can easily learn and use it. nano is not up for the task and hence ash. For professionals, vim would still be the recommended editor to use. I don't want to add the vim-like features you are requesting because then the question becomes where to draw the line? Soon users would like to have ash support thousands of mode commands like vim. My objective is not to provide a vim-alternative, rather a terminal alternative to simple GUI text editors that the average not-so-tech-savvy person can use (without any sort of learning curve).