Aaron Lehmann wrote: > Using a non-vi-compatable editor on boot disks is a hanging offense > that debian will pay for once sysadmins try to install Debian but > realize they have better things to do than learn a whimpy editor. It > would be excusable if it was emacs-compatable, but it's not. e3 > supports vi, emacs, wordstar, AND pico bindings. It just depends > whether you type vi, emacs, or pico to start it. > > Personally I would perfer ed to nano, since it is traditional and more > people know how to use it.
The great Vi/Emacs Wars are irrelevant to this issue: the people encountering ae for the first time aren't looking for a crash course in your favourite coding utility, they need an instantly usable text editor, and one that's perfectly accessible to newbies who have never seen anything better than Wordpad. Nano-tiny scores highly on this count, since it is a functional bonsai-scale editor any fool can pick up on their first encounter - no "learning" is necessary (or worthwhile, unless they're going to be keeping it as the only editor on the system). But ae will do. Just about. -- Justin B Rye - writing (in jed) from but not for Datacash Ltd