Decent Unix Editors!! (one man's opinion, anyway)

[Kent Paul Dolan]

 cpetterb at glacier.sim.es.com (Cary Petterborg) writes:

> g_harrison at vger.nsu.edu (George C. Harrison, Norfolk State University)
> writes:

>> Does anyone know of a "decent" program (ascii) editor for Unix (SYS V
>> REV. 4). By "decent" I mean anything that is not vi or emacs or
>> versions thereof!

>> I have heard that there is a VMS-like EVE editor, a WordStar-like
>> editor, a WordPerfice-like editor, etc. for Unix, but I haven't been
>> able to trace them to any FTP site or commercial product.

>> You may or may not suppose that I am a Unix fan, but I am sincerely
>> interested in some kind of SCREEN-ORIENTED editor for Unix (on the
>> Amiga) that does not fall into the vi/emacs like functionality (or
>> non-functionality).

Compared to the best programmer's editor I've seen (company proprietary
on an MS-DOS '386 box, not for sale), nothing on Unix is even close.
You best bet would be to chase down the folks who do Brief, and ask if
they intend or have a Unix version.  As the workstation market expands
and comes down in price, and the installed base goes up, and the binary
OS call standard spreads, the market becomes big enough for the shrink
wrap product vendors to consider, so there may be something available by
nwo.

> You appear to want a word processor program not a program editor. If
> you want a word processor, emacs may not be your cup of tea. Even as a
> program editor you may not like emacs (I agree about vi). But DON'T
> say that emacs is not a decent program editor. Emacs, by its proven
> popularity is a decent program editor.

Nonsense. Emacs may be a good editor (I like it) but that doesn't follow
from your logic. The two driving forces in its widespread use are that
it is public domain, and thus widely ported, and also thus free, and
that there isn't much else around better.

It's a big step up from vi for editing code, but it is a long, long way
from "decent".

1) There are whole categories of desirable features either missing or so
obscure as to be unanvailable; like decent, easy to type, text chunk,
rather than file or window oriented, navigation commands; like useful
file requestors; like buffer selection without retyping the buffer name
every time.

2) There are lots of completely counterintuitive, grotesquely bad and
hideously inconvenient design flaws that are grandfathered in and will
never get fixed, like:

  sabotaging users whose destructive backspace key is not DEL but ^H by
  using that for the hard wired (and nearly impossible to remap at edit
  time) "help" key,

  and the counterintuitive and frustrating near miss on being character
  oriented, as when a newline gets ignored as a self-insert when a blank
  line already follows it.

3) It's scripting and macro command language is wonderfully obscure and
only loveable by people heavily into AI or text processing programming;
most Emacs users haven't a clue about Lisp, which means for most people
the macro facility is unavailable.

4) The learning curve is much too steep. You can sit down with a good
shrink wrap, menu oriented editor for microcomputers and everything is a
mouse selection or two away, available for instant use; it can take
months to even _find_ the emacs online help, much less be comfortable
with using it.

There are good and sufficient reasons that lots of people detest emacs.

>     In an insane society the sane man must appear insane.

> Unless the world is insane, you are wrong. Maybe it is just your
> ignorance about emacs that is the problem.

There speaks a man who has never used a _really_ good editor.

> Are you really a professor?

Yes, George is really a professor, and he's almost as old as I am, and
a lot more useful to the world.

> A statement as you made seems awfully narrow minded.

Not nearly as much so as yours.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>