BIG help if trn accumulated my keystrokes, for WHY BLEW UP

[David Combs <dkcombs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear trn-workers and hackers,

(trn4, that is)

trn has *so very many* single-letter commands, both lower-
and uper-case -- so VERY many, it is really easy to hit the
wrong one, or having read some doc and trying something
you thought it said (or *did* say!), and royally
screwing yourself.

The problems here are worse than with even emacs --
at least there there is a multiple-"undo", an incredible
life-saver.

PLUS, it also has C-h l, which shows the 100 most recent keystrokes,
which lets you answer the "what the H did I do to cause this
horrible thing"?


(Actually, 500-chars would be a lot better, because it might
be some time before you even notice a screw-up's result.)

Of course, the extra time expended to maintain this
char-sequence is independent of how many you keep,
either with an array index and a mod to make it circular,
or an actual linked list -- a pretty simple code-additon.

Maybe even different verbosities -- one of the emacs-style,
as the chars separately listed (ie space separated) going
across the page,

<NOTE: the following wish-list kind of "nice-to-have" stuff 
          could be maybe (or maybe not) considered well
          *after* implementation of the simple "remember
           he most recent ... chars, and then on command,
           spit-em somewhere>

but also for of a higher verbosity, an annotated list,
the chars going down the page, each char (that's worth
annotating) being annotated with what trn took it to mean).
That'd be a *real* help!




The biggest difficulty might be finding a still-available key
to attach to a command "please show me those saved chars" -- maybe even
with a prompt asking how many (of the what, 500, 1000, ...?  num
chars that get remembered chars remembered. 

--

Oh, another prompt might be "want them written to a file?  If so,
give the file-name to write them to: ", because whatever gets
written to the screen can scroll-away presto-quicko.

--

Also useful would be if it also kept track of which of those
characters trn treated as "commands", rather than some part of
a regexp or the like.

As well as marking-cmds, like "." or "+", etc, whatever seems
reasonably simple to do, 
----

Anyway, it'd sure make it easier for the trn-helper to figure
out what went wrong if the user submitted that too.




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Please, can we get a discussion going on this.

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