Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!princeton!njsmu!telesci!frnkmth!bill From: bill@franklin.com (bill) Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Super-simple UNIX editor Keywords: simple UNIX text editor simped dte emacs elisp WordStar Message-ID: <14Jun91.074991.1984@franklin.com> Date: 14 Jun 91 07:49:41 GMT References: Organization: Franklin Electronic Publishers Lines: 41 In article jpc@avdms8.msfc.nasa.gov (J. Porter Clark) writes: : > I'm looking for a text editor that runs under UNIX and is so simple : > that the MS-DOS community could use it. It doesn't have to do : > complicated stuff. : > : > I have users who would like to use the mailers and newsreaders on my : > system but who don't want to have to learn vi or emacs to do so. Once upon a time, there was this thing called the Rand editor. I think you could call it the granddaddy of all windowing editors. It has some descendants that might do. Mined (not to be confused with the mined of Minix), is or was a freely distributable editor based on (cloned from?) the Rand editor. It is what I use and the interface could hardly be simpler. Unfortunately, the version I have is *very* old and a somewhat buggy, so I won't send out its code. (None of the bugs are critical, but they do require someone to "just know" what things not to do.) I understand that there are some people working on a newer version somewhere, but I don't know their e-mail addresses. If you become desperate, I can probably go through the chain of "so and so said"s and find out. Then there was the Grand editor, put out by Dave Yost. This was distributed as source code, but was a commercial product. It was comparatively cheap, though. I haven't heard of him or his editor in quite some time, so I have no idea what's up. Finally, there is or was Ten+ from Interactive. This was more than an editor, but it had at its core an adequate editor. I mention it so that I can bad mouth Interactive. The basic idea of their product was sound, but their implementation sucked, their support was worse than nonexistent, and their marketing brain damaged. Stay away from it. All these editors qualify as "simple" in that you can get a novice computer user to do useful work with less than an hour of training. Heck, I've only given my wife a few minutes of instruction and she uses it for her writing with only the occasional question to me.