Vertical cursor movement or positioning cursor behind the end of line

[van.de...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I have read few articles at http://ergoemacs.org/ and fully agree with Xah's point of view. I have few attempts to start using emacs but failed in favor of more conventional editors. Now I am going to try ergoemacs, but have one question, very important to me:

Can (ergo)emacs move the cursor *vertically*?

Let us assume the cursor is in column, say, 10 of a line. The next line is empty, and I press down key. In most editors, including emacs, the cursor will be positioned in the *first* column of the next line, while I want the cursor stick to it's original column 10.

I know that line is empty, and there is no characters in column 10, but I do not see reason why I cannot position cursor there and, for example, start typing. When I move cursor vertically, either by line or screen, I want it keeps its original column, because the cursor jumping to the left and right make me nervous. :-)

I searched inet for a solution (applicable to emacs), but failed. Someone recommend me to use picture mode, but it does not work for read-only buffers.

Any ideas?

[Matthew Fidler]

Ergoemacs-mode does not do this. A minor mode may, but I'm not sure if there us one. 

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[Xah Lee]

i don't know of a solution neither.

just to be clear, when the cursor is on a line with stuff again, it jumps to the right column.

afaik, picture mode is your best bet.

off hand i'm not aware of any editor that does what you wanted. Which you were thinking?

 Xah

[van.de...@gmail.com]

> just to be clear, when the cursor is on a line with stuff again, it jumps to the right column.

Yes, I know. But only if there are enough characters in the line. So, if you start from a long line, the cursor chaotically jumps to the left and right. You should remember old text displays — they could display reversed, underlined and blinking text. Many programs used it because there are no many capabilities. However, many user interface gurus said blinking text should be used very carefully because it is too distractive. To me the cursor chaotically jumping left and right when I move it vertically is like that blinking text — too distractive.

> off hand i'm not aware of any editor that does what you wanted. Which you were thinking?

Not many.

mcedit, internal editor of midnight commander has checkbox "Cursor beyond end of line".

Geany. It is scintilla-based editor. They call it "virtual spaces". Being enabled, virtual spaces allows the cursor to be positioned behind the end-of-line. There are some other scintilla-based editors, but they usually do not use/expose this feature of scintilla.

Also, recently I was suggested to use vim. "set ve=all" command in .vimrc enables desired behavior.