i'm still not a vim power user by any means, but i've noticed that when i 'vim a_directory' it pops up in a dired like mode.

That's not what I asked. I had a DOS-based editor that did that fifteen years ago, and it didn't even have macro facilities, much less was scriptable.

and i remember back in decades past that there were macros that could create and solve a maze. i simply assume that vim is Turing Complete

That's not what I asked, either. In fact, I think I specifically said that a macro facility, however advanced, is not the same thing as being fully scriptable. If I have to stop my editing and do something else special in order to invoke the macros... my keyboard can do (a limited amount of) that on its own, irrespective of what editor I am using. But that's not enough for serious use. I need the editor itself to be scriptable, meaning that I can script arbitrary things to happen as a natural part of the editing process. Have you ever seen cperl-mode in action, for example? I type while <FOO and get the following: 

while (<FOO>) {
}

[download]

More usefully, I have my own custom stuff for editing CGI scripts. It uses cperl-mode but does some extra things on its own, such as automatically inserting close tags when I put in open tags (in strings), to ensure wellformed XHTML. (It also has a lot of very site-specific stuff in it too.)

it also does syntax-highlighting on the fly

A lot of editors do syntax highlighting without being anything that resembles scriptable.

my whole take on the emacs thing is you don't have an editor with a scripting language, you have a scripting language with an editor module as the default interface.

I suppose that's a fair enough description of it. It's an approach that creates a lot of flexibility and power. 

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}

[download]

In reply to Re: There's a level in Hell reserved for ________ by jonadab
in thread There's a level in Hell reserved for ________ by dws

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