Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!wivax!cadmus!harvard!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA From: HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: editors Message-ID: <12721@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Wed, 22-Aug-84 22:16:24 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12721 Posted: Wed Aug 22 22:16:24 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 25-Aug-84 03:37:29 EDT Lines: 18 From: Charles Hedrick You might want to rethink EMACS. We have some experience with this. We started out on our DEC-20 with roughly the same reaction, that EMACS was too complex for the average user. Thus we taught, and supported, a quite competent but simpler editor. Slowly but surely all of our users have migrated to EMACS, one by one as they needed some feature that only it had. Interestingly enough, we found that we had to move our secretaries first, as they needed the most serious word processing. Since EMACS is configurable, you might consider designing a word processor that you would like, and then configuring EMACS to look like it. Our two biggest breakthroughs in making EMACS generally accessible were 1) putting the most commonly used functions on a keypad, so people normally could use dedicated keys instead of those escape sequences. [This is very easy to do -- in your system-wide profile, put (bind-to-key "character sequence" "functionname")] 2) removing unnecessary commands from accessibility by novices. -------