On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 02:32:23AM +0900, Matt Gushee wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 01:07:00AM +0900, Firestone, Mark - Technical Support wrote:
> > Ah, but I want to connect this to the Ruby BBS program that I wrote, so that
> > users on the other end of a telnet connection can use it to edit their
> > messages...
> > 
> > No idea how to even think about going about that...
> 
> If the main requirement is exchanging text over telnet, then shouldn't
> you be looking for an editor that will interact with telnet? Many

Uh, scratch that. I wasn't thinking clearly. But I think I see what you
mean now: people log into the BBS server through Telnet, and will need
to use an editor that runs in the Telnet window, right?

I still don't think you need to limit yourself to an editor written in
Ruby. First of all, I would guess there isn't one. But even if there is,
it's unlikely to be as good as Emacs, VI, Pico, etc. That's not meant to
disparage Ruby, but writing a good text editor is a lot of work, and
Emacs has been under development for at least 15 years, VI even longer.
So why don't you give your BBS program a generic interface
(socket-based, shell-based, I don't know, but probably one of the two)
so that people can use any of several editors to interface with it? That
way, your users get a good text editor, and you don't have to create it.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee / havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/