Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!sdsu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!seth
From: seth@ctr.columbia.edu (Seth Robertson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Is there any wordprocessor in unix
Message-ID: <1989Jun28.044952.7861@ctr.columbia.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 89 04:49:52 GMT
References: <7868@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <590@lakart.UUCP> <19907@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: seth@ctr.columbia.edu (Seth Robertson)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Center for Telecommunications Research:  Columbia University
Lines: 30

In article <19907@cup.portal.com> dbell@cup.portal.com (David J Bell) writes:
>From David Goodenough:
>
>>From article <7868@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>, by mysore@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Swamy Bale):
>>> Hi everybody
>>>    Just wondering, is there any word processor utility in UNIX bsd 4.2
>>
>>Nothing WYSIWYG (thank goodness :-) )
>>Try ?roff (nroff, troff, roff, ptroff, glorkroff, ......)
>
>OK, *roff will *format* most anything I want. But what about a friendly,
>near-modeless, full-screen editor? Like WordPerfect, frinstance? And for
>that matter, what the hell's wrong with WYSIWYG, other than being a greatly
>overworked buzzword? Some of the tools available to PC's and (ick..) MAC's
>are not only useful, but powerful. Why should UNIX be denied the same tools?


The actual reason why there are no WordPerfect-like (or WYSIWYG-like)
editors on BSD or SV or SunOS is because ASCII terminals can't do
graphics (like fonts or scaling or most anything).

Sun has quite a few products (notably Frame, and now SunWrite) that have
stepped in to fill this gap, but they only work on the console, not on
any terminals that you happen to have lying around.

This is true on all Unix machine.  PCs and (ick) MAC's don't use dumb
ttys, they use (usually) bitmapped terminals.
-- 
					-Seth Robertson
					 seth@ctr.columbia.edu