On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, Sue Blake wrote:

> I'm pretty sure that when pico does that it breaks lines to make them
> fit, but it does not join lines together and reflow the whole paragraph
> as you type. Put the cursor before "reflow" in the line above, type in
> a few words, and you see this whole paragraph reformat as you type.
> With the cursor at "Put" above, delete (forwards) and watch all the
> later lines being sucked up like a snake as more and more characters
> are deleted. That's what he wants, and I've never seen pico do this.
> I have seen it happen with the ee editor supplied with FreeBSD, in its
> autoformat mode. To the user it feels as if it really is treating the
> text as paragraphs, not as groups of lines.

You got my interest with that, so I ripped ee out of a FreeBSD-2.5.5
distribution and got it to compile and link against the ncurses in the
our package system. For comparison, I tried it out on a FreeBSD-3.1
system. That 3.1 box doesn't have the sources on it, though.

It doesn't reflow quite as fluently as a Mac editor. After you delete
some text, you still have to type something for it to rejustify. Maybe
I'm missing something, but if you have to hit a CR and then a
backspace to reformat the paragraph, you'd be better off just hitting
a single key, IMO.

<ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/> evidently distributes the sources in an
archive broken up into floppy size pieces, which make it difficult to
get just a few files. This is as far as I want to take it. Here's a
patch to the Makefile, in case anyone else wants to pick up on this.

--- src/bin/ee/Makefile.orig	Sun Sep 14 20:35:08 1997
+++ src/bin/ee/Makefile	Thu Apr 15 08:52:29 1999
@@ -1,27 +1,28 @@
 CFLAGS+= -DCAP -DHAS_NCURSES -DHAS_UNISTD -DHAS_STDARG -DHAS_STDLIB \
 	 -DHAS_CTYPE -DHAS_SYS_IOCTL -DHAS_SYS_WAIT -DSLCT_HDR
 
+PREFIX?=/usr/pkg
 PROG=	ee
-LINKS=	${BINDIR}/ee ${BINDIR}/ree
+LINKS=	${PREFIX}/ee ${PREFIX}/ree
 MLINKS=	ee.1 ree.1
-DPADD=	${LIBNCURSES} ${LIBMYTINFO}
-LDADD=	-lncurses -lmytinfo
+LDADD=	-L${PREFIX}/lib -lncurses -ltermcap
+CPPFLAGS+=	-I${PREFIX}/include
 
 LANGS=	en_US.ISO_8859-1 fr_FR.ISO_8859-1 de_DE.ISO_8859-1
-FILES=	${LANGS:S/$/.ee.cat/}
-CLEANFILES+=	${FILES}
+NLSFILES=	${LANGS:S/$/.ee.cat/}
+CLEANFILES+=	${NLSFILES}
 
-all: ${FILES}
+all: ${NLSFILES}
 
 .for lang in ${LANGS}
 ${lang}.ee.cat: ${.CURDIR}/nls/${lang}/ee.msg
-	gencat -new ${.TARGET} ${.ALLSRC}
+	gencat ${.TARGET} ${.ALLSRC}
 .endfor
 
 beforeinstall:
 .for lang in ${LANGS}
-	${INSTALL} ${COPY} -o ${BINOWN} -g ${BINGRP} -m ${NOBINMODE} \
-	    ${lang}.ee.cat ${DESTDIR}${NLSDIR}/${lang}/ee.cat
+	${INSTALL} ${COPY} -o ${BINOWN} -g ${BINGRP} -m ${NONBINMODE} \
+	    ${lang}.ee.cat ${PREFIX}/nls/${lang}/ee.cat
 .endfor
 
 .include <bsd.prog.mk>