Editor Wars N, where N is large

[Mike Urban]

In article <318 at wyszecki.munsell.UUCP> jwf at munsell.UUCP (Jim Franklin) writes:
>
>I think people in netland are missing some very basic points in all this.
>What people are forgetting when they flame vi, emacs, gnu, etc. is that
>they have been using their favorite editor for a *long* time.  They
>forget how painful that first week was. They forget that it took them a
>month before they could put the manual away.  They forget that it took
>them six months to get really proficient at it.  Now they edit in
>"autopilot" mode -- both head and fingers do the right stuff without
>conscious thought.  Then they try a new editor and say
>
>        "^H?  What the hell does that have to do with moving a cursor?"
>        "What is mnemonic about ESC[^23j ??"
>        "What moron wrote this editor?!?!?"
>
>The answer is that it doesn't really matter.

This Editor Wars discussion is also going on in net.text.  I think that
when we are discussing "ease of use" or "mnemonic value", we forget
something very important: The Packaging.  If you go around a word-processing
department and ask the people which word-processing software they like
to use, you find that they find packages like Word Perfect "easy to use".
But are they really easier to use (as editors) than vi or emacs?  I don't
think so.  You still have a whole slew of Special Buttons that have little
Intrinsic Relationship to the task at hand.  I think the reason that 
non-techist people find these systems easy is because of the supporting
material: a user manual written in a step-by-step fashion with lots of
illustrative examples, an uncluttered reference card for the most often-
used functions, nifty cut-outs or key caps that fit onto the terminal
for special functions, glossy paper, large type, etc., etc.  If you
could package vi or emacs this way (or TeX or Troff, for that matter),
everyone would immediately start rating these programs much higher.
And the intrinsic properties of the programs wouldn't change a bit.

One side observation.  We have a steady trickle of people here
who migrate (for one reason or another) to Unix from VMS.  Former
EDT users do find Emacs easier to deal with than vi, since Emacs
is, like EDT, single-mode.  
-- 

   Mike Urban
	...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"