Re: editor alternatives?

[mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 10:06:40PM +0300, Eray Ozkural wrote:
> > people, it simply is. Put a bunch unfamiliar with any editors in front
> > of computers, and I'll lay money on the outcome that people using Nano
> > are less confused, more confident, and more productive(in the short
> > period of time given - obviously something more advanced like Vim or
> > Emacs can increase producitivity if the people using it actually *know*
> > the apps).
> 
> I'l tell you why. pico and nano are two of the most intuitive console based 
> text editors in UNIX. I think norton commander editor ripoff midnight 
> commander editor also comes into that category.

Define intuitive.  Every time I sit down in front of nano I keep on typing
C-x, C-s only to scroll-lock the screen.  Why is C-x any more intuitive than
:wq ?  I think that you shouldn't throw that word around so carelessly.

> 
> jed is one of the cut-down emacs-like's out there, but I don't recommend it 
> for editing plain text files. It's good for editing source code, though. If 
> you want an emacs rip-off, zile or jove might be better. No comments about vi 
> or derivatives. OK, I can't resist it. They belong to 1970's.
> 

Then I can't resist this: every time I sit down to type in a limited-ability
text editor like nano, I keep on missing features such as 'cw' or 'd^' which
give very precise editting instructions which nano simply can't do.  You're
reduced to hitting Ctrl-D a lot.  That's not the sign of a very efficient
editor.  Having said all that, I think that vi-derivatives are programmer/
engineer's editors, because they rely on the user having the ability to
think of the result of an arbitrarily complex operation (regular expressions).
Vi is really an text manipulator with an insertion-mode.

However, most vi-derivatives are line-based editors (excluding vim) and
I find emacs better for dealing with s-expression based code.

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;; Matthew Danish                         email: mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu ;;
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