Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!sdsu!ucselx!polyslo!cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu!tdrinkar
From: tdrinkar@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu (Terrell Drinkard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Something else you can't do on the Mac
Message-ID: <1990Jan2.194210.2304@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 2 Jan 90 19:42:10 GMT
References: <1284@marlin.NOSC.MIL> <970@v7fs1.UUCP> <129727@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <2702@aecom.yu.edu> <24107@gryphon.COM>
Sender: news@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (News Guru)
Reply-To: tdrinkar@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu.UUCP (Terrell Drinkard)
Followup-To: comp.sys.mac
Organization: Cal Poly State University -- San Luis Obispo
Lines: 58

In the spirit of the New Year (as good an excuse as any) I would
like to push this thread back in the direction of PC's.  I love
Macs, but I also use my '386, and I read this group for news and
information related to these sorts of computers.  So, I'm
redirecting followups to comp.sys.mac.  I hope many of you will
continue to follow this conversation there, as I feel it brings out
a lot of stuff that many of us would never have found out
otherwise.  I for one have learned a couple of things I didn't know
about Macs, and about unix (I'm still working on awk, thanks).

Anyway, back into the breach...

In article <24107@gryphon.COM> jspear@gryphon.COM (Jon Spear) writes:
>In article <2702@aecom.yu.edu> werner@aecom.yu.edu (Craig Werner) writes:
>>	I do this a lot.
>>	Download a text file.  Now try to display it. On a PC, use type.
>>On a Mac, you can't. 

I wanted to take this opportunity to point out that type is not the
only text viewer on the PC, and in fact is quite probably the
poorest choice for the job.  What do you do if want to read and
edit more than one screenful at a time?  Several possibilities lept
immediately to mind and I wanted to see what other people came up
with as well.
1)  Pipe the output of type through more.  This may or may not work
depending on you particular version of DOS (I don't think it works
on mine, but then I'm running a test-version of 4.01).  As an
alternative, I downloaded a unix-like more from somewhere (I
forget) that will view the text by itself.  I like that for viewing
but not editing.
2)  My prefered method - use an old version of PCWrite (comes up as
'ed.exe') for reading and editing.  It is small and fast and has a
tolerable interface.  I use it from within ProComm Plus.
3)  Use the PC vi program.  It feels sort of like beating your toes
with a hammer before putting on tight shoes, but there are other
people who are much happier with vi than I am, and far more
proficient.  More power to them.
4)  Use a full-blown word-processor.  My last resort, same problems
as pointed out with using the Macs word-processors - wrong tool for
the job.
5)  Hey, this one just occured to me.  XTreePro has a file
viewer/editor.  I've even use it from time to time, and though it
is kind of like WordStar, I like having it there.  Very nice touch.
6)  DOS 4.0 has it's own file viewer.  I'm not nearly as happy with
this one.
 
Anyone else have some suggestions?  Particularly as they compare
and contrast with various Macintosh methods?  I would like to hear
them, I think most of us can use either machine, though we all have
biases and probably use one machine much more than the other.  Here
is an opportunity to see what is available.
 
Terry

Disclaimer et la Signaturo:
Hell no, I'm not responsible for what I say!  If everyone were
responsible for what they said, we'd have had a balanced budget in
1984.