Use of ``vi'' for business office word-processing

[andrew at stc.co.uk]

As someone else just said we all know what this is about anyway...

A few years ago, when I was still subscribing to Byte rather than the
net, there was an excellent editorial discussing the concept of "user
friendly", the gist being that it was something that varies very much
with  time and experience.   The start-up time with say LEX-11 is
relatively low - the menu driven front end leads the new user by the
hand into document composition, and there are those who use systems
sufficiantly infrequently for this to be a good and acceptable approach
to text generation.  We have such users, and I will not attempt to 
"wean" them from it.  On the other hand those users who will be on
the system every day are introduced to vi immediatly, and LEX-111 only
to look at the first group's documents "in the raw".

For those who need to work every day with these things some sort of
extremely high powered text editor is rather more what is required
since, even if initially the hyperdrive features are not used or
understood they will eventually be wanted.  The user no matter how
inexperienced initially will quickly come to recognise the result of
the various operations, be they embedded formatter commands or editor
built-ins.  To start with everyone spends a lot of time consulting the
quick reference card or pull down menus or whatever is appropriate for
the system they are using, yes even *you* did --- remember the first
time you used TECO or "ed"?  As one gains in experience one no longer
needs or wants the continual harrasment of the naive user's prompts,
and so a system which supplies them must have a way of turning the darn
things off.

I used to think that Wordstar was GREAT, I could tell it to shut up
unless it was obvious I was stuck, then I found out about nroff etc,
and becam a fan of embedded command formatters.  --- I think the point
I'm trying to make is that if you know what you are doing, as any FULL
TIME user very swiftly does, then the  underlying system hardly
matters, what is important is that it does not get in the way, nor
require excessive effort to achieve one's required results To this
degree I fully support the use of vi as a general editor --- the simple
approach of explicitly laying out a one page memo is possible, yet in
combination with a suitable post-processor (LaTeX, nroff -mm or
simmilar relatively High level mark-up language which divorces the user
from style decisions) it is suitable for preparing major documents.


(as an aside I personally use qed for most purposes but do not
recommend it to casual users.  There are occasions when I need vi or
emacs however, and I am happy to use all the tools at my disposal as
and when there is need)

In conclusion Nothing Is Ever Ideal for every user but if you were
going to "bike" from SF to NY which would you prefer?  a honda 50 or as
big a harley davidson as you could pick up...  The answer as always
depends on your experience, and may well change on the journey --- as
you are learning to ride the Honda 50 is a suitable machine, but in the
end for long distance travel you want a bit more comfort.   Just so
with editors.
-- 
Regards,
	Andrew Macpherson.  <andrew at tcom.stc.co.uk>  {backbone}!ukc!stc!andrew