10 Jan
2020
10 Jan
'20
11:18 p.m.
On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Dan Cross wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:39 AM Nemo Nusquam
<cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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?)
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.
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.