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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!killer!usl!usl-pc!jpdres10
From: jpdres10@usl-pc.usl.edu (Green Eric Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.editors
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <237@usl-pc.usl.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 89 16:43:22 GMT
References: <222@imspw6.UUCP> <252@torch.UUCP> <2112@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com>
Reply-To: jpdres10@usl-pc.UUCP (Green Eric Lee)
Organization: Univ. of Southwestern La., Lafayette
Lines: 82

In article <2112@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com> loo@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com (Joel Loo) writes:
>I hope this is not an editor war but honest  discussion  of  pros
>and  cons  of  various  editors. I have used over a dozen of text
>editors/word processors.  My comments might be  useful  to  some:
>(take note that I came to use vi only recently, it is my LAST and
>NOT the first editor.)

>natural  to  him. Use of the mouse is, again, nice for beginners,
>but I find it a pain when I was forced to use it in Smalltalk and
>Macintosh;  I just could not do cutting and pasting as fast as in
>vi (nothing to do with my agility, it is inherent  with  mice,  a
>lot of hackers will agree with me).]

Mice will never replace the keyboard for operations such as, e.g.,
cut-and-paste. But mice have their place. Anti-mice people might b*tch
and groan, but -- pointing at a point, then clicking the mouse button,
is a much faster way of getting to that point than repeatedly hitting
the cursor keys (for one thing, I always overshoot).
     And for someone who's not a regular user of a particular text
editor, pull-down menus are a godsend. At least, if they're a
supplement to keyboard commands, and not a replacement. Want to know
what the command is for, say, "delete sentence"? Pull down the
"Editing Operations" menu, select the "delete" item, select the
"sentence" sub-item which has the "M-^D" keycode abbreviation to tell
you how to do it without the menus next time... and it's all just one
stroke of the mouse, without all the typing and searching needed for,
say, the GNU Emacs help function.
     (slight note: I am an EXTREMELY fast typer... maybe some people
may find themselves slowed by occasionally moving a mouse with their
right hand, but I don't see how).

>I had use a few text  formatters/word  processors  too.  WYSIWYG:
>Wordstar,  MS  word,  WordPerfect,  PageMaker,  FrameMaker.  Non-
>WYSIWYG and non-interactive ones: TeX and Runoff (DEC).

WordPerfect is only slightly WYSIWYG. It mostly combines a normal text
editor (somewhat stripped) with a text formatter (somewhat similar to
nroff or runoff, with about the same power except when it comes to
typesetting capabilities).  I have used a true WYSIWYG text editor on
a computer with a bit-mapped display, and found it so slow as to be
almost unusable (upgrading from 68000 to 68020 might have helped, but
who's going to buy a $1K add-on just to run a word processor???).

>flexible as TeX or xxxOff; fully WYSIWYG software encourages time
>wasting  since  users do a lot of fine adjustments; most 'WYSIWYG

"time wasting"? You sound like the old folks who wouldn't allow people
to "waste" computer time by editing on-line when they could do it for
"free" by punching up cards before-hand! I haven't seen any studies as
to whether WYSIWYG software improves or decreases productivity (and
note that productivity can be measured by more than words per
minute... if the output looks more polished and professional, that's a
form of increased productivity too).

>Finally, vi is efficient in a lot of operations, especially those
>that we do 80% of the time during an editing session. There are a

Perhaps... I really don't know, since I'm not a regular vi user (I use
it to occasionally do a quick-and-dirty operation, else I use Emacs,
which I learned years before I saw my first Unix machine). But I might
note that VI doesn't do a couple of things which I count as necessary.
You cannot edit multiple files onscreen at the same time (with the
ability to freely move text between them), and you cannot have
multiple windows into one file (e.g., one at the top into
declarations, one at the bottom into the function you're currently
writing). 
     These are not trivial considerations. My current PC is an Amiga.
I have been searching for a programming text editor for some time, and
have never found one that satisfies me completely. The two
considerations above (multiple windows, multiple files) are the
most-missed features. The program I use most for "C" code, Matt
Dillon's DME editor, does multiple windows (iconifiable to get them
out of the way real quick) and is very "C"-friendly, which is why I
prefer it over MG Emacs. Still, though, I find myself missing the
ability to look at two parts of a file at the same time... especially
since I run a 52-line screen, which lets me SEE my text, instead of
the common 24-line portholes which get a bit frustrating at times.

--
|    // Eric Lee Green              P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509     |
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