Thursday, January 13, 2000, 9:01:36 AM, Nick wrote:
> Good post Steve... I'm finally beginning to see your point on using an
> external editor. :o) However, what about us that are not comfortable with
> some of the Unix style editors you mention.
Which is perfectly understandable. Until I took the dive into vim a few
months back I didn't much care for them either. I know perfectly well that it
isn't for everyone and as much as I might tout its advantages or take small
potshots from the sidelines that a certain editor can do a certain task easily
I don't think I would ever advocate a single editor for everyone.
At the core, editing text is central to a lot of work that people will do
on a computer. It is an interface, like every other interface, that really
should be up to the user to define since only they can decide what works best
for them.
So while I point out that I use vim for a great variety of things, it
isn't to evangelize vim but rather the concept.
> I'm not sure of the terminology, but what I'm getting at is... what "good"
> editor do you know of that will have a decent GUI to make it easy for us
> less technical people to use?
Given the above (which I'm sure you understood before I wrote it) it
really is individual taste. Personally, I much prefer editors based on the
WordStar capabilities than anything else. CUA based editors just don't sit
well with me because of the poor marking of text being virtually required to
do anything. I'm not familiar with the emacs interface (not wanting to put in
a 20mb lisp environment on my server just to learn the keyset) and the vi
model (sans vim extensions) also doesn't suit my tastes.
Those are my tastes and they are also severely tainted with my strong
desire to have a unified editor across the no less than 4 platforms I use in
my day-to-day activities (Win98, WinNT, Linux, Solaris).
What I do recommend is that people look around and find something that
works for them. Normally the good "Programmer's editors" are also good with
email because they are tuned for heavy editing ASCII editing tasks, have
context highlighting and generally have a "mail mode".
<http://www.winfiles.com> has a good selection of editors. If anyone is
really interested in my specific opinions after hearing all this I'd be more
than happy to go through and pick out a few which, at a glance, would at least
interest me into learning how they operate at more than the basic level.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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