[snip]
I have a nodding acquaintance with vi and extensive experience with a very simplified version of emacs. I classify vi in the same category as TECO: it'll do everything and anything but its user interface sucks green toads.
I am looking for (and found) a very simple editor which is capable of opening a text file, let me change a few chars, and save the result. No fuss, no fury, no extensive capabilities needed nor desired.
Weather getting any warmer up there yet?
I was looking for a texteditor with extensive capabilities, but still easy to use and with no nosense. For example,
- who invented the stupid question (when you close your program or shut down your computer) "do you want to save the changes ?"
- why doesn't a document open at the position where I closed it ?
- why doesn't the computer open my documents, that where open when I shutdown the computer ?
With paper and pen I had/have all these features ;-)
Stef Mientki
My favorite is TextPad
Britt
Stef Mientki wrote in news:5bf41 $42a9e5f3$83aef479$ snipped-for-privacy@news2.tudelft.nl:
Well, actually, sometimes I don't want to save the changes...
The editor I use does do this.
The editor I use does remember what documents I had open, and when I launch it, it opens those same documents back up.
That's nice, I have all these features without pen and paper.
-- Richard
then you type too much and/or think too little ;-)
great !
almost great !
No, you still have to answer the first question mentioned and the document(s) is(are) not left open on your desk.
Stef
>
forgot to ask, what editor do you use ?
Stef
Well, *I* won't disagree with that, but... for every one of us who thinks the vi interface sucks, there are at least an equal number of those who think the emacs interface sucks. I don't know exactly what the differences are in the people who chose one or the other (but I do know that I can't live with the modes in vi).
Sometimes that is needed, for example on an embedded system. But on my desktop or on my laptop, I run a full blown XEmacs
*server*. Hence, when I want to have a simple editor, gnuclient is a simple editor with no fuss, no fury and it pops up in milliseconds. Of course, I often as not want a really complex editor, and it is that too. As a result, I just need but one editor.Too warm. It's 40F outside. It will be above freezing most of the time until late September, and I'll just sort of tolerate it until then. October through April are good times, because it *never* rains! Of course May through August aren't bad, because it rarely ever rains. September is miserable.
-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com
Some fairly bright programmer who also understood human nature. Thank goodness, too!
You don't know how to to that? You must have a horrible editor, or else you aren't familiar with it.
You shut your computer off? Why?
You can't reformat what you wrote on the paper. You can't run a spell checker on it. You can't compile it. You can't run any kind of text analyzer on it. And you can't "pretty print" it either.
Or, you can't easily do any of those things with the press of a few keys.
-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com
Seconded.
-- "If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article. Click on "show options" at the top of the article, then click on the "Reply" at the bottom of the article headers." - Keith Thompson
I changed the subject, in the hope to get some responses of younger users. (btw I'm even older then most of who responded in this thread ;-)
This thread is only talking about Vi en Emacs, and even with my long experience, I've never heard of either of them.
Half a year ago, I did some websearch on text/code editors, and found Scintilla as the best. I've to admit that I didn't really try Scintilla, nor any of the other ones. My judgement was just based on reading the first webpage of each of the editors and my conclusion was that none of the texteditors (except Scintilla) did have any major advantage over my current editor (SynEdit). Even the advantages of Scintilla were too small to switch to another editor.
Now I'm interested: did anyone make a comparison between Vi or Emacs and Scintilla ??
thanks, Stef Mientki
The two cited references below do *not* address my comment quoted above. They address a related issue, which is mildly interesting, but different. (And a trivial waste of time...)
Not a well studied essay, but merely a knee jerk reaction.
His premises are that 1) he can't find many people who have actually used several editors and compared features, and 2) that the preferences observed are just "the deep irrational devotion that many programmers have for their editors". His belief is that the first editor people become skilled at, they bond to.
Certainly there is some validity to his observations, but the analysis and conclusions are poppy c*ck.
This is Peter Seebach's more general (and much better thought out) essay on the syndrome cited above. Seebach does use editors as one of several examples. Regardless, it doesn't discuss the same subject as my comment above.
Specifically, the first cite supposes that because people don't actually *know* many editors and compare feature sets, that they have made an irrational choice based on some other arbitrary factor. But there is *no* *need* to compare editor feature sets and the highly irrational part is expecting users to waste the enormous amount of time it would take to make such comparisons.
Both vi and emacs can do anything: end of feature comparisons!
The trick is learning one of them well enough to know how to make the best use of it. What is needed is a *methods* comparison and studies matching those to human characteristics to determine how well a given user can learn and use each editor. That does *not* seem to be easy or well understood.
My statement was that I'm not sure just which of the many
*methods* differences between vi and emacs are the ones that various people key on when they make a selection, or which human characteristics could be used to predict which editor a person would probably be most comfortable with.In my case it is very clear that I do not get along with vi's modes, and find emacs' key bindings more logical. Some people have exactly the opposite reaction, while others just don't see those as significant, and have other criteria.
Wouldn't it be interesting to have an Editor Adaptability Test, where you spend an hour or two answering multiple choice questions and doing a few simple tasks, and at the end you get a pair of percentile ratings that indicate your predicted ability to adapt to each of vi and emacs!
-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com
Both statements are improbable :-) The latter because Emacs and Vi have been around for at least 25 years in some form or another. What I have never heard of is Scintilla.
-- "If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article. Click on "show options" at the top of the article, then click on the "Reply" at the bottom of the article headers." - Keith Thompson
That would be great idea ! Preferable the tasks should be done with your own kind of documents. But who is interested in creating such a poll ?
Stef Mientki
Well, I've heard of, and worked with all three. Scintilla (in the form of wScite) is still on my machine; the others have been removed.
Bill
Quite true. And another point not often considered is that when the user is more than satisfied with his present editor, why invest that time?
My own take on emacs is that a) I have no wish for an editor to try to be anything but an editor (so much of what is in that venerable package is a waste for me), and b) I find the default key bindings entirely unacceptable, as they leave me with cramps in my hands, and c) rewriting the definition of key bindings while a neophyte is a fool's errand. Also, I want an editor to be transparent to my wishes, which means either it must work like what I am used to or it must have a very short learning curve. In the end, I have no compelling reason to use emacs, so I do not.
I find emacs' key bindings entirely logical, and entirely uncomfortable. ;)
To each his own, I say!
Bill
...
That particular essay as much as said that anyone who'd been using one editor for 10 years should have been out there every few years giving *every* editor a full test for usefulness!
I think it takes a very significant investment in an editor to learn it well enough to make a decision. Just imagine investing that kind of time in 10 different editors every couple of years!
And imagine the productivity hit that would cause, because about half the time one would be using a relatively unfamiliar editor.
-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com
Then IMHO what ever you have accumulated there may well be long, but it doesn't really qualify as "experience". Doing any kind of research on available editors and not coming across at least some rendition of both vi and Emacs is, roughly said, impossible.
The very idea that "the" webpage of a given editor must even exist is wrong. Some have none, others have more than you can visit in a day.
And that's before you start worrying about the relative percentage of hard fact vs. marketing drivel to be found on the main pages of commercially distributed editors. Might as well judge hamburgers by the appearance of their makers' TV commercials.
If Scintilla's makers didn't, why should anyone else bother?
-- Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de) Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Emacs came out around 1977, unified from a collection of editing libraries dating back considerably further. (But back in the 1970s it was only available on 4 individual computers.) There have been commercial versions of Emacs (entirely different implementations) as long as there have been microprocessors.
Stef Mientki wrote in news:ee917$42aa03ca $83aef479$ snipped-for-privacy@news2.tudelft.nl:
Codewright, no longer supported, but still quite happy with it.
-- Richard
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