Bob Miller
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 22:19:00 -0800
Jamie wrote: > clearly pico/nano are simple text editors, not fancy programming > environments or word processors.. just a simple text editor.
Yes. That's a virtue not to be overlooked. Each of us has limited time to commit to learning new systems, so we ought to focus on those that will actually help us most. If you're going to spend 20+ hours a week editing text files, then by all means, invest the time to learn emacs. If you're going to make a one line change in a config file every couple of weeks, then why bother? As a software developer, I don't regret having learned emacs for a minute. Being able to customize emacs's C++ autoindentation for a given client's coding style standard, to pick an example, is great. But I'm aware that 97% of the people using Linux don't need that. (Actually, I can't think of any task other than programming that involves heavy use of text files these days. Plain text used to be a more widely used document format. Of course, lots of people are programming...) That's why I love Apple's old ClarisWorks office suite. I create five "office" documents a year. ClarisWorks had just about enough functionality for me, and what it had was very accessible so I could get things done. OpenOffice is hard for me to use, both because it has too many bells and whistles, and because I can never find anything. Did ClarisWorks (nee AppleWorks) ever get ported to MacOSX, BTW? -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug