[TUHS] screen editors

[Dan Cross]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:39 AM Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> In earlier days, my wife was given email by telnetting to an SGI system
> and using elm.  One day, I visited her office as she was composing a
> message.  Intrigued, I asked her what the editor was. She did not know
> and pointed to her cheat-sheet listing editor commands.  One was ^X^C to
> exit-and-send.  She is not a programmer and I was a bit surprised at
> their choice.
>

Hmm, I'm actually kind of not. Starting users off with a modal editor (that
starts in command mode, no less!) can be surprising for novices; with
emacs, at least you can start typing text and, well, see text.

I think that one of the smartest things Marc Crispin ever did was write
`pico` to go with `pine`. A simple editor targeted at the novice was really
useful for casual and/or new users, particularly as the Internet spread and
an account on a Unix system was the default introduction to email etc for
so many.

        - Dan C.
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