[COLUG] To need a tutorial is a failure of the software

[Rob Funk]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Michael Meffie <meffiem at neo.rr.com> writes:
> >  Now, if technical people
> > are writing the code for themselves, you'll end up with emacs and
> > vi.
>
> Actually, Emacs has most of the makings of a great text editor for
> lower-end powerusers.  (Real end users, of course, don't need a text
> editor except the one built into their mail client and the textarea
> widget of their browser.  But the Emacs learning curve scares off some
> people who are sufficiently advanced to regularly use e.g. Notepad,
> and that is a shame.)

Back when I started using email at OSU in 1992, I had a choice between 
three different editors: emacs, vi, and one I'm pretty sure was a 
home-brewed (at OSU) hack called fse.  With no Unix experience at the 
time, I chose emacs because it was the only one that seemed to handle my 
arrow keys properly.  (fse was supposed to be simpler, but apparently was 
hard-coded for vt100 terminals and I was using a vt52 terminal emulator on 
my Atari.)  Learning the right keys to do the basics in emacs was pretty 
easy, between the on-screen help and the cheat-sheet I got from OSU.

The only thing I ever found hard about emacs was the backspace problem, 
which has largely been solved by now, at least in Linux.

Later I learned to harness some of emacs's power, but I didn't find the 
initial learning curve a problem at all.  vi was a different story, even 
with a cheat sheet....

So basically, working arrow keys and non-modal behavior are the most 
important requirements for a friendly editor learning curve.
-- 
==============================| "A slice of life isn't the whole cake
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> | One tooth will never make a full grin"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"