Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uc!uf!fin
From: fin@uf.msc.umn.edu (Craig Finseth)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: structure editors
Message-ID: <111@uc.msc.umn.edu>
Date: 6 Jul 89 14:47:29 GMT
References: <4134@ima.ima.isc.com>
Sender: news@uc.msc.umn.edu
Reply-To: fin@msc.umn.edu (Craig Finseth)
Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Minneapolis, MN
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I did a pretty thorough review of the literature as of 1980 for my
thesis and came to the (private) conclusion that there is no
NON-anecdotal evidence in this area.

Let me rephrase that somewhat.  There are objective things to do,
e.g., figure and count minimal keystrokes.  However, there is no
*objective* way of doing anything useful with that knowledge.
(Suppose that I were to devise an editor command set based on a
bit-level Huffman encoding of all common editing operations.
Certainly a minimal keystroke count, but I would not want to use it.)

Once you have gathered the objective data, it is time to add
substantial quantities of human insight to the mix.  Devising and
understanding editor command sets is not an exact science.

You may wish to rephrase your request to allow non-objective comments,
but comments that at least have a general basis.

--- Non-Objective Comments Follow ----

I will take the liberty of responding in a non-objective fashion.
Ignore this if you like.

I prefer general text editors (Emacs, in particular).  There are two
reasons for this:

1) The particular general text editor that I use is fairly non-modal
(at least as non-modal as one can reasonably get given ASCII term
interaction) (I turn off the language-specific modes).  The structure
editors that I reviewed were all fairly modal.  I believe that
non-modal interaction is to be preferred (c.f. Apple Computer Corp's
"Human Interface Guidelines").

This is not to be interpreted as claiming that a structure editor
*must* be modal, merely that I have not seen examples of a
(reasonably) non-modal one.  Show me an example and I may change my
mind.

2) I use a text editor as a general text-manipulation device.  It can
be used to edit programs, documentation, things-to-do lists, mail
(:-), as a small spreadsheet (I use a calcualator to do the math), as
a directory editor, and so forth.  Everything I learn when editing
programs carries over perfectly to all other areas.

If I had the best possible structure editor for programming (say, the
C language), it would make programming easier.  It would not, however,
help me in any of the other areas and none of my learning would be
transferable.  I think transferable learning is good (c.f. all of the
integrated environments (Macintosh, Windows, UNIX, X Windows, etc),
both bad and good).

Thus, even if someone was to show me an example of an extremely good
structure editor, my reaction would probably be "that's nice, and it
does a good job at X, but what about Y, Z, ...?"

Craig A. Finseth			fin@msc.umn.edu [CAF13]
Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.	(612) 624-3375