[TUHS] screen editors

Steve Nickolas usotsuki at buric.co
Sat Jan 11 03:18:09 AEST 2020


On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Dan Cross wrote:

> 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.

This is one of the reasons I liked E when I first used it: it was modal, 
but it started in edit mode.  (Also you KNEW what mode you were in, which 
I understand isn't always the case with vi, although it usually is in the 
clones iirc?)

> 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.

And I still use nano - which is a rewrite of pico.

pico Just Works(R)(TM)(C), and it's not enormous.  nano adds a few things 
I like, but the UI is the same.  Heck...I still use PINE and am sending 
this message from it ;)

-uso.


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