editors

[HEDRICK at RUTGERS.ARPA]

From:  Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK at RUTGERS.ARPA>

You might want to rethink EMACS.  We have some experience with this.  We
started out on our DEC-20 with roughly the same reaction, that EMACS was
too complex for the average user.  Thus we taught, and supported, a
quite competent but simpler editor.  Slowly but surely all of our users
have migrated to EMACS, one by one as they needed some feature that only
it had.  Interestingly enough, we found that we had to move our
secretaries first, as they needed the most serious word processing.
Since EMACS is configurable, you might consider designing a word
processor that you would like, and then configuring EMACS to look like
it.  Our two biggest breakthroughs in making EMACS generally accessible were
 1) putting the most commonly used functions on a keypad, so people
	normally could use dedicated keys instead of those escape
	sequences.  [This is very easy to do -- in your system-wide
	profile, put (bind-to-key "character sequence" "functionname")]
 2) removing unnecessary commands from accessibility by novices.
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