Vi versus Word. The pros and cons (or why does Vi remiond me of a bigger version of notepad?)
jma...@quiknet.net
have evolved from the first computer question I asked (God forgive me)
and have seen a number of programs I've never seen or heard of, much
less used. So, I let my overweening (Dorothy's word) curisotity take
over and off I went to the local search engine and lo and behold! a Vi
site. So, with great anticipation, I downloaded the WinVi file (what?
only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?) So, my curiosity has
peaked, I open the zip file and run the program. Huh? This is Notepad
with a floursih or two....what did I miss? I go back to the posts;
everyone still extoling the grandness of Vi.
WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
out of the water!
Ok. Guns drawn, water ballons at the ready....
Set.....
Go!
jmalone
Jonathan W Hendry
> WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
> From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
> out of the water!
Yes, when you drop it on top of VI, it does. That's the point, I
think. VI does everything needed for editing text, in a tiny amount
of space. Word does a whole lot of stuff for making text look
purty, in a ton of space.
If you read the documentation for vi, you'll find that it's
a whole lot more than Notepad. Regular expression support alone
puts it way ahead of Notepad. Probably ahead of Word, too.
I doubt you can really get the full use of vi in Windows anyway.
Check out:
http://roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~kompella/html/vi_faq2.html
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jxh/vi.html
Just how big is Word these days anyway? On my system, vi is
536k, but it's compiled to run on Intel, Sparc, and 68040.
--
Note: email to this address goes to /dev/null
To email a reply, write to jon at exnext dot com
Ian
>Ok. So Ive been watching seferal of the word processing threads that
>have evolved from the first computer question I asked (God forgive me)
>and have seen a number of programs I've never seen or heard of, much
>less used. So, I let my overweening (Dorothy's word) curisotity take
>over and off I went to the local search engine and lo and behold! a Vi
>site. So, with great anticipation, I downloaded the WinVi file (what?
>only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?) So, my curiosity has
>peaked, I open the zip file and run the program. Huh? This is Notepad
>with a floursih or two....what did I miss? I go back to the posts;
>everyone still extoling the grandness of Vi.
>
>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>
>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>out of the water!
You're right. Vi is basically a simple text editor with a really
messed-up, but keyboard-only interface. Notepad with a different
interface.
Dorothy J Heydt
[I downloaded something called vi off the net, what's the big deal?]
Possibly what you downloaded wasn't the real thing? Or possibly
you didn't know what you were dealing with?
>.... So, with great anticipation, I downloaded the WinVi file (what?
Yes, what? is the operative word. I don't know what WinVi is.
If somebody would tell me, maybe we can take that further.
>only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?)
One written back in the days when even mainframes had less space
than toasters do nowadays.
>...Huh? This is Notepad
>with a floursih or two....what did I miss?
I don't know; I've never used or even seen Notepad and don't
know what it is.
But maybe I have a clue. Did you possibly run through all the
vi-related posts without noting that it is an EDITOR and NOT
A FORMATTER ?
It won't take your text and turn it into a paragraph. It won't
justify your lines. It won't provide page breaks or whatever.
As you're typing in vi, you embed in the text the {}roff commands
that will format the text when you're done editing. It's not
a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] program.
In typing this text, I had to put in carriage returns by eyeball
when I observed the line getting near the edge of the screen (though
there is a "wrap" command you can set to do that automatically; I
just haven't bothered on this system). I'm putting out ASCII
text with no extra characters, and if I want to _underscore_
something or discuss a cliche', I have to use the venerable old
ASCII approximations. I don't care. Because I am putting out
text as fast as I can type, which is pretty fast, and when I revise
I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard, ever.
>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>
>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>out of the water!
As mentioned above... I think you mistook a text editor for a
formatter.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
_A Point of Honor_ is out....
Jay Random
>
> As mentioned above... I think you mistook a text editor for a
> formatter.
Now, now. Vi was never meant as an _English-language_ text-editor, but
as a _source-code_ editor. Profound difference.
The fundamental building-blocks of source-code are characters, keywords,
& lines. The fundamental building-blocks of natural language are words,
sentences, & paragraphs. Vi is adequate for handling the former (though
the hard distinction between data-entry & editing modes is a screaming
ergonomic failure), but something worse than useless for the latter.
The survival of vi into the age of universal WYSIWYG graphical displays
is something of a mystery to me. Even a straight text-editor ought at
least to support a full-screen display with navigation via arrow keys --
& most do. There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
Ted Nelson would give you forty lashes with something considerably more
painful than a wet noodle. I shall simply shake my head & mutter things
about the state of your arteries.
If you're going to use a programmer's editor to write natural-language
text, at least have the decency to use something that can stand the
strain, like EMACS or TeX.
--J. Random Occasional Hacker, D.G.F.V.
Graydon
>everyone still extoling the grandness of Vi.
>
That's a tiny implementation of some subset; vim is not quite six Mb,
plus another six or so for Xwindows support.
The formating half can go up to 60 Mb if one is using TeTeX or
similar.
--
> mail to graydon --> goo...@interlog.com <
"But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty which produced
it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in
Faerie is more potent." -- "On Fairy-Stories", J.R.R. Tolkien
Dennis L. McKiernan
I tried sending this to you at jma...@quiknet.net, but it keeps
bouncing (perhaps there's an error in your return address), so I
am posting my reply to your email here.
jma...@quiknet.net wrote:
> Dennis. What is _wysiwyg_??
What You See Is What You Get = wysiwyg
Older kinds of word processors were "command" types (e.g.,
Wordstar, vi/troff, etc.) and what you input were commands as well
as text. By the way, vi is simply an _editor_, and troff is an
_output formatter_ which reads the command lines and outputs the
text as the embedded commands dictate.
For example, vi/troff files might look like ...
.P
The moon shone down across
the land,
its platinum light illumining the world.
.P
Gregory
readied his bow as the foe came onward.
Stabbed in the ground before him
were seven more arrows, standing ready.
He would have a clear shot as soon as they passed in front of the
bluff, for there the way was empty of trees. "Come on, you
bastards,"
he whispered, drawing the nocked shaft to
the full.
.sp 1
In
the fortress, Belinda paced the flagstone courtyard, fretting
over Gregory's absence.
In the above example, what you see is rather hodge-podge and
definitely _not_ what you will get when you output it through an
output formatter, for in the above, the "command" lines are the
".P" and the ".sp 1" lines, and the text is couched in between.
In this
example, .P stands for "give me a new paragraph" and .sp 1 stands
for "give me one verticle space."
In a wysiwyg system, such as Word, the same stuff would look
like this:
The moon shone down across the land, its platinum light
illumining the world.
Gregory readied his bow as the foe came onward. Stabbed in the
ground before him were seven more arrows, standing ready. He
would have a clear shot as soon as they passed in front of the
bluff, for there the way was empty of trees. "Come on, you
bastards," he whispered, drawing the nocked shaft to the full.
In the fortress, Marion paced the flagstone courtyard, fretting
over Gregory's absence.
So, in one case we have a "comand" word processor, and in the
other case we have a wysiwyg (pronounced "wissywig") word
processor.
---Dennis
--
Dennis L. McKiernan ~ http://home.att.net/~dlmck
Into the Fire
(hardcover, forthcoming September '98)
Into the Forge
(hardcover, released September 97)
(paperback, forthcoming September '98)
Recent Books: The Dragonstone; Caverns of Socrates
Aahz Maruch
Jay Random <jra...@shaw.wave.ca> wrote:
>
>The fundamental building-blocks of source-code are characters,
>keywords, & lines. The fundamental building-blocks of natural language
>are words, sentences, & paragraphs. Vi is adequate for handling the
>former (though the hard distinction between data-entry & editing modes
>is a screaming ergonomic failure), but something worse than useless for
>the latter.
In your opinion. Obviously, several of us disagree. The hard
distinction between text mode and command mode is precisely why many of
us like vi: we're touch-typists and we *never* have to leave the main
keyboard. Much faster. Vrooom!
>The survival of vi into the age of universal WYSIWYG graphical displays
>is something of a mystery to me. Even a straight text-editor ought at
>least to support a full-screen display with navigation via arrow keys --
>& most do. There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
>habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
vi does support navigation by arrow keys, assuming your terminal is set
up correctly. Some versions of vi even allow you to use them during
text mode.
>If you're going to use a programmer's editor to write natural-language
>text, at least have the decency to use something that can stand the
>strain, like EMACS or TeX.
TeX isn't an editor, it's a formatting language that requires markup
tags to be inserted by the editor, just like nroff/troff. Emacs is
okay, but I hate having to use the control and meta keys all the time.
Plus, I started on Wordstar, and I firmly believe in kinesthetic rather
than mnemonic locations for keys, particularly the basic editing ones.
--
--- Aahz (@netcom.com)
Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 <*> -=> http://www.rahul.net/aahz
Androgynous poly kinky vanilla queer het
"..., and some of you may regard all women as evil traps that exist
only to tease, torture, and suck out your very soul." --DrMax
Aahz Maruch
You missed the editing capabilities. For text *entry* notepad is
roughly the same as vi -- assuming you never make mistakes. But vi is
much better than notepad as an editor. And, as someone else pointed
out, the regex capabilities of vi blow Word out of the water.
>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>out of the water!
Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
Empress of Blandings
>...Emacs is
>okay, but I hate having to use the control and meta keys all the time.
>Plus, I started on Wordstar, and I firmly believe in kinesthetic rather
>than mnemonic locations for keys, particularly the basic editing ones.
After almost 20 years of using Emacs, those -are- kinesthetic
locations for me. Conveniently, I'm also running NeXTStep, which
means I get to use the same command keys everywhere else, as well.
--
____
Piglet \bi/ Momentum! A paying market for metrical poetry.
pig...@piglet.org \/ http://www.piglet.org/momentum
Dorothy J Heydt
Jay Random <jra...@shaw.wave.ca> wrote:
>
>The fundamental building-blocks of source-code are characters, keywords,
>& lines. The fundamental building-blocks of natural language are words,
>sentences, & paragraphs. Vi is adequate for handling the former (though
>the hard distinction between data-entry & editing modes is a screaming
>ergonomic failure), but something worse than useless for the latter.
Y'know something? You're wrong.
>
>...Even a straight text-editor ought at
>least to support a full-screen display with navigation via arrow keys --
>& most do.
? Vi does use a full-screen display, and you can use the arrow
keys to get about... though mostly I use h, j, k, l, which are
right there under my fingers. At least some versions of the ADM3A
had the arrows printed on the plastic keys to remind you which
was which.
There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
>habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
Very old habit, yes. We're talking nearly twenty years, which
is 140 in dog years and even older in computer years.
But the major reason is that I can do everything I want without
taking my hands from the keyboard. I have a mouse [well, a
trackball] attached to my keyboard. I have a row of function
keys from F1 to F12. I have arrow keys and "Insert" and "Page
Down" and all that other stuff. I don't need 'em.
>Ted Nelson would give you forty lashes with something considerably more
>painful than a wet noodle.
If you were to tell me who Ted Nelson is, I might be impressed.
[Totally off-topic, my son was chiding me last night for not
knowing who Betty Pa[i]ge was. Seems she was a pin-up girl of
the 1950s. I had never heard of her. I'd heard of Betty Grable,
who played a similar role in the 1940s, but not this other
person. My son was shocked that I had never encountered this
basic cultural icon that used to have her picture taken with and
without clothes.]
>I shall simply shake my head & mutter things
>about the state of your arteries.
In the complete absence of information, why not?
Jay, you're getting cantankerous again. Watch out.
Aahz Maruch
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <35CC2E...@shaw.wave.ca>,
>Jay Random <jra...@shaw.wave.ca> wrote:
>>
>>Ted Nelson would give you forty lashes with something considerably more
>>painful than a wet noodle.
>
>If you were to tell me who Ted Nelson is, I might be impressed.
Ted Nelson is the Guru of Hypertext. And he'll gladly tell you that
over and over again. Never mind that Douglas Engelbart actually
invented it (among other things, including the mouse).
>[Totally off-topic, my son was chiding me last night for not knowing
>who Betty Pa[i]ge was. Seems she was a pin-up girl of the 1950s.
>I had never heard of her. I'd heard of Betty Grable, who played a
>similar role in the 1940s, but not this other person. My son was
>shocked that I had never encountered this basic cultural icon that used
>to have her picture taken with and without clothes.]
There's a lot of interest in her in the alternative sexualities
communities for some reason. I haven't been able to verify to my own
satisfaction whether she's *really* from the 50s or is a fairly recent
model doing 50s-style pinups (not that I've done a lot of research).
Kristopher/EOS
>
> In article <35cbe384...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
> >
> >WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>
> You missed the editing capabilities. For text *entry* notepad is
> roughly the same as vi -- assuming you never make mistakes. But vi is
> much better than notepad as an editor. And, as someone else pointed
> out, the regex capabilities of vi blow Word out of the water.
>
> >From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
> >out of the water!
>
> Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
> at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
> But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
If Works 4.0 had a bit more in the way of control over columns and had
a capability for different layouts in different sections, I'd never
use anything else. But, for some of what I write, layout and columns
and borders and whatnot are absolutely vital. Therefore, I am a
heathen, and use Word 97. Oh, I'm evil.
Kristopher/EOS
Berry Kercheval
> >[Totally off-topic, my son was chiding me last night for not knowing
> >who Betty Pa[i]ge was. Seems she was a pin-up girl of the 1950s.
>
> communities for some reason. I haven't been able to verify to my own
> satisfaction whether she's *really* from the 50s or is a fairly recent
> model doing 50s-style pinups (not that I've done a lot of research).
She's actually from the 50's -- and is alive and well and living somewhere
with her husband, away from publicity.
The reason the alternative sexuality communities are interested is
that she was one of the first "popular" models to do bondage; and
looked rather like a clean-cut all-American girl with striking black
hair. There are many pictures of her taken by the likes of Irving
Klaw with ropes, straps and paddles.
One magazine tracked her down a couple of years ago and got her
permission for an interview; I seem to recall that the gist of it is
that she's rather surprised at her popularity and somewhat gratified,
but wants no "current" publicity.
--berry
David J. Parker
>have evolved from the first computer question I asked (God forgive me)
>and have seen a number of programs I've never seen or heard of, much
>less used. So, I let my overweening (Dorothy's word) curisotity take
>over and off I went to the local search engine and lo and behold! a Vi
>site. So, with great anticipation, I downloaded the WinVi file (what?
>only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?) So, my curiosity has
>peaked, I open the zip file and run the program. Huh? This is Notepad
>everyone still extoling the grandness of Vi.
>
>
>out of the water!
>
Well, you've sort of missed the point, I think. It all depends on what
you're looking for in a program.
If what you are looking for is an all-in-one, WYSIWYG, graphical word processor
that will let you enter text, format it,change fonts, spell check, and all the
other bells and whistles you might care to name, then what you want is
Word or one of it's bretheren.
But if what you want is a quick, speedy text editor, with which you can enter
text and quickly and easily move around in the file without ever having to
take your hands off the keyboard, and a small, nearly-impossible to crash
program that will fit on a floppy and that you can run on just about *any*
machine in the universe, then what you want is vi.
Vi was not made to be a word processor. It's a simple text editor, mostly
used by we UNIX gurus who need to edit the bazillion or so ASCII system files
in a speedy manner on a day to day basis. It is also routinely used by
many older UNIX programmers, although now a days most people seem to want a
graphical environment for writing their code in. However, it is also quite
useful for prose writing, in that it takes about a tenth of a second to load
up and start typing text into a file, it outputs in clean ASCII so that you
can later manipulate it with just about any other program you care to
mention, and combined with {some}roff, can make beautifully formatted
output the rival of any word processor.
Personally, I don't recommend vi to anyone who doesn't also need to use it
for something else. I need to use it daily for UNIX system administration,
so it was a simple matter to start using it for writing as well. But if you
want a go-anywhere program that you can run on just about any DOS/WIN based
machine (vim) and comes standard with just about any UNIX flavor you care
to mention, then vi is the way to go.
-- Dave
David J. Parker
Ian <iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
><jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>
>>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>>
>>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>>out of the water!
>
>messed-up, but keyboard-only interface. Notepad with a different
>interface.
>
Half right. Vi is just a simple text editor, in that it reads and writes
straight ASCII only. It is *not* "Notepad with a different interface."
If I tried to write out all the things I can do in vi that I can't do in
notepad, it'd take me days. However, it would also bore you to tears, because
all of the major things I do with vi have to deal with UNIX system
administration, of which you probably care nothing about. I don't want to
start a holy war here (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's
best to just let it be) so I'm not going to say anything further in favor of
vi. However, some of us *like* that "messed-up" interface. It pleases us to
never have to waste our times by taking our hands of the keyboards.
-- Dave
David J. Parker
>>
>> As mentioned above... I think you mistook a text editor for a
>> formatter.
>
>Now, now. Vi was never meant as an _English-language_ text-editor, but
>as a _source-code_ editor. Profound difference.
>
>& lines. The fundamental building-blocks of natural language are words,
>sentences, & paragraphs. Vi is adequate for handling the former (though
>the hard distinction between data-entry & editing modes is a screaming
>ergonomic failure), but something worse than useless for the latter.
>
>least to support a full-screen display with navigation via arrow keys --
>habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
Some of us still have the dumb terminals. As a UNIX system administrator,
sometimes the only access I have to the massive servers here at work is
through the dumb terminals that hook directly into the back of the machines.
If you need to save a dieing system, and you don't have the convenience of
a slick GUI to coddle you, you use what's left--and that's vi. I'd
be completely lost without it here at work, and I'm sure any other UNIX
admin would tell you the same thing (except for those wierdos who use Emacs
and pico--*shudder*)
As much as they hate it, the world is not yet owned by Microsoft. Some
things can (and in many cases, must) be done at the command line on most
any UNIX system you care to mention. Again, as I said in another post, I
don't wish to start a holy war here, so don't try to tell me that everything
ought to be GUI in the first place (I've got about a bazillion reasons why
that's simply a stupid idea, but I'll keep them to myself unless provoked.)
>
>Ted Nelson would give you forty lashes with something considerably more
>painful than a wet noodle. I shall simply shake my head & mutter things
>about the state of your arteries.
>
>If you're going to use a programmer's editor to write natural-language
>text, at least have the decency to use something that can stand the
>strain, like EMACS or TeX.
>
If what you want is something that will do some/all of your formatting, then
yes, go ahead and use Emacs or TeX or LyX or whatever. But if what you want
is fast, simple, no fuss, no muss text entry from a program that is next to
impossible to crash and fits in your shirt pocket, then what you want is vi.
Trust me.
-- Dave
pa...@webnexus.com
Parker) wrote:
> Vi was not made to be a word processor. It's a simple text editor,
Well, it is a little more than a simple text editor. I haven't seen
mention of VI's main strength besides size and speed, it's integration
as a UNIX tool. You can pipe any piece of text through a UNIX
pipeline. This can be immensely powerful, instead of trying to put
everything into your text editor, allow anything in your operating system
to process text in your text editor.
Sam, who is *not* a VI freak or power user but is aware of its power.
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum
Jon Poole
statement:
>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
>But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
But _why_? Where have you got this idea that you can't *write* on
anything except a basic text editor. I like writing on word because
for years I've written straight onto paper and my handwriting has been
so abysmal I like to write and see it come up neatly. It's perfectly
useful for writing, it can also prepare what you write for sending off
to publishers too.
Jon
--
(Hand Of Evil, meet Tinky-Winky)
"Ee-oh" <WHUPCH>
j...@apathy.demon.co.uk http://www.apathy.demon.co.uk/
kens...@hotmail.com
[snip]
> WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
In the wacky world of computers, here's a more-or-less inescapable rule:
If you want the software to do more stuff for you, you have to give up some
of your control.
This is part of why UNIX people say UNIX is so much better than Windows,
while those of us who use and like Windows look at UNIX and think they're
crazy. Same deal with VI. It's a power-user app, and unless you think it's
easy and/or fun to sit down and write shell script and yadda-yadda-yadda,
it's not for you.
If you don't mind that kind of thing, than VI is excellent because you can
make it do anything you want.
> From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
> out of the water!
Word does lots of stuff on its own, right out of the box. Getting it to do
that stuff in different ways, or to do different stuff that it can't normally
do on its own, that's much tougher.
Another way of putting this is that VI is the kind of program that waits for
you to tell it exactly what you want it to do. Word thinks it knows what you
want--and it's usually right. When Word is wrong, you have to argue with it.
When you don't know how to tell VI what you want it to do, you're stuck.
Most people will add, "And never the twain shall meet," or somesuch. Ideally
(don't hold your breath), we will one day have self-programming (more or less)
application packages that are as easy to use as Word but as easy to configure
and control as VI.
You'll tell the computer, in some form of plain language (not necessarily
spoken English, but maybe, assuming you speak English): I want my word
processor to have default margins like *this*, and handle view-zoom stuff
like *this*, and do spell-checking automatically in the background but not
present the results until I ask for them." And so forth. And the software
will happily go and configure the word processor *for* you, and do it
correctly.
This will require substantial advances in several areas of computing. In the
meantime, make do.
> Ok. Guns drawn, water ballons at the ready....
>
> Set.....
>
> Go!
I first used VI back in 1988 or so, on a UNIX box, and, if I can help it, I'll
never use it again. I don't even *want* to be that technical.
> jmalone
See? We agree again. At least sort of.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
I don't have a solution but I admire the problem.
kens...@hotmail.com
aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
> In article <35CC2E...@shaw.wave.ca>,
> Jay Random <jra...@shaw.wave.ca> wrote:
> >
> >The fundamental building-blocks of source-code are characters,
> >keywords, & lines. The fundamental building-blocks of natural language
> >are words, sentences, & paragraphs. Vi is adequate for handling the
> >former (though the hard distinction between data-entry & editing modes
> >is a screaming ergonomic failure), but something worse than useless for
> >the latter.
>
> distinction between text mode and command mode is precisely why many of
> us like vi: we're touch-typists and we *never* have to leave the main
> keyboard. Much faster. Vrooom!
There's a lot to be said for that. I touch-type reasonably accurately and,
from what people tell me, very fast. One of the things I loved about my
customized version of Word 2.0 is that I never needed to touch the mouse. I
wrote macros and reassigned keys until I could do everything I ever needed to
do without moving my hand.
As it is, I complain every time I find something in Windows that the keyboard
can do as well as the mouse (or, often, better) but which has no built-in
keyboard support. This is usually an obvious oversight, rather than a design
element, on MS's part.
> >The survival of vi into the age of universal WYSIWYG graphical displays
> >is something of a mystery to me. Even a straight text-editor ought at
> >least to support a full-screen display with navigation via arrow keys --
> >& most do. There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
> >habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
But, again, there's much more to VI than Notepad-like text editing. My
brother, who *is* technical as well as being about to collect his PhD in lit
crit, develops software, professionally, on several different platforms,
simultaneously. He runs VI (or Vim, an improved version) on--quick
count--twelve different operating systems, if you consider different versions
of UNIX to be different OS's. It runs very well on all of them.
He can make VI do all kinds of things that Notepad and Word can't do.
Admittedly, I doubt VI can do *everything* Word can do, but it does some
things much better, and it has a much, much smaller executable, takes up much
less drive space.
He uses VI for all plain-text stuff, like email and news. He uses WordPerfect
for academic composition.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Berry Kercheval
> [MS Word is] perfectly
> useful for writing, it can also prepare what you write for sending off
> to publishers too.
The thing so many (and I am one) object to is that for probably 90% of
what professional writers do, Word is massive overkill. Fiction
publishers want double spaced, ragged-right 12 point Courier on one
side of the page, with pages numbered, and italics indicated by
underlining. That's all. Nearly any text editor can accomplish that,
and some folks prefer one a bit more lightweight than Word.
Frankly, I don't really care what any one person uses; I use my tools,
you can use yours. But if you ask my opinion I'll give it. (And no, I
don't use vi OR Word, if anyone cares.)
--berry
jma...@quiknet.net
wrote:
>In article <35cbe384...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>
>[I downloaded something called vi off the net, what's the big deal?]
>
>Possibly what you downloaded wasn't the real thing? Or possibly
>you didn't know what you were dealing with?
Ouch. See if I play with you again.
>Yes, what? is the operative word. I don't know what WinVi is.
>If somebody would tell me, maybe we can take that further.
See _VI Lovers Homepage_ @
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
I downloaded The WinVi version because I had no idea what all the
other versions were about, but I will be downloading all of them to
see....
>
>>only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?)
>
>One written back in the days when even mainframes had less space
>than toasters do nowadays.
Ah, the good ole days. When Bill gates told us we'd _never_ need more
than a 640k hard drive.....
>
>>...Huh? This is Notepad
>>with a floursih or two....what did I miss?
>
>I don't know; I've never used or even seen Notepad and don't
>know what it is.
Re: See any computer that has Windows (3.11, 95 or 98) It's a little
editor (not a very good one at that, which is included with the
Microsoft Windows program...
>
>But maybe I have a clue. Did you possibly run through all the
>vi-related posts without noting that it is an EDITOR and NOT
>A FORMATTER ?
No No No .... I saw all that; I _misunderstood_ allthat as well. But,
the way everyone was going on about it, I thought I'd missed
something. I'm afraid my computer knowledge began in the Windows
era.....
>
<snip cause my server/news reader sucks...depends on the time of day>
>In typing this text, I had to put in carriage returns by eyeball
>when I observed the line getting near the edge of the screen (though
>there is a "wrap" command you can set to do that automatically; I
>just haven't bothered on this system).
Uh-hu, uh-hu.
> I'm putting out ASCII text with no extra characters, and if I want to _underscore_
>something or discuss a cliche', I have to use the venerable old
>ASCII approximations.
Whew. I need a drink...
>I don't care. Because I am putting out
>text as fast as I can type,
Which for me is about 30 words per minute, 20 if I actually want
everything to be spelled correctly.
> which is pretty fast, and when I revise
>I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard, ever.
Whoa. Seems like an awful lot of trouble. Then again, I grew up with a
mouse soldered to my right hand.
I'm also neither a touch typist or a very fast one. But I get by. I'm
always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
_later_.
<snip>
>
>Dorothy J. Heydt
Dorothy J Heydt
>
>See _VI Lovers Homepage_ @
>
>http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Can't; I don't have web access. I'll tell my husband, who has
used more editors than I've ever heard of (including Notebook)
and still likes vi....
>>>only 124k? What kind of program is this anyway?)
>>One written back in the days when even mainframes had less space
>>than toasters do nowadays.
>
>Ah, the good ole days. When Bill gates told us we'd _never_ need more
>than a 640k hard drive.....
Oh, no. I'm talking about the late 1970s, when nobody on the
planet except maybe his mommy had ever *heard* of Bill Gates.
Those *were* the days.
>>text as fast as I can type,
>
>Which for me is about 30 words per minute, 20 if I actually want
>everything to be spelled correctly.
and for me is 90-100, you see. I have a reason for not wanting
my fingers to waste their time by being taken off the keyboard.
Dorothy J Heydt
>
>In the wacky world of computers, here's a more-or-less inescapable rule:
> If you want the software to do more stuff for you, you have to give up some
> of your control.
Oh, yes, that's a very good expression of a basic truth.
>...VI ... is a power-user app, and unless you think it's
>easy and/or fun to sit down and write shell script and yadda-yadda-yadda,
>it's not for you.
That's not quite true. I spent years trying to learn to handle
shell scripts, and never really succeeded. (I can write a
foreach command if the circumstances are *really*simple*.)
>Another way of putting this is that VI is the kind of program that waits for
>you to tell it exactly what you want it to do. Word thinks it knows what you
>want--and it's usually right.
That's the problem, you see. It's usually *wrong.*
> When Word is wrong, you have to argue with it.
>When you don't know how to tell VI what you want it to do, you're stuck.
You're saying the same thing two ways. When Word is wrong you
have to find out how to tell it what to do. When vi is wrong you
have to find out how to tell it what to do. In the latter case
(if I don't already know how, because I've been using vi nearly
twenty years), I dig up the old manual. In the former case,
I have to ask my husband because he can find the answer in the
labyrinthine mazes of the Help files.
It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
and nothing else will ever seem as good?
>Most people will add, "And never the twain shall meet," or somesuch. Ideally
>(don't hold your breath), we will one day have self-programming (more or less)
>application packages that are as easy to use as Word but as easy to configure
>and control as VI.
And they'll run on Linux.
ti...@sff.net
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
<snip>
> It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
> baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
> and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
> and nothing else will ever seem as good?
<snip>
That's very true for me. The first "editor" I used was an old typewriter
given to me on my ninth birthday. I didn't start using computers until a
couple of years later, but by then the visual and input format of the
typewriter had already stuck with me. (On our old Tandy, which we didn't
have a word processor for, I used to write some of my stories as programs in
basic! What a pain!) I was using typewriters almost exclusively for nine
years. Although I do find Word clunky at times, it's similar enough to using
a typewriter that my brain can accept it without too much problem.
pa...@webnexus.com
> baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
> and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
> and nothing else will ever seem as good?
I don't remember the first editor or operating system I used.
The first I used for more than a cursory amount of time
was an IBM APL system, and I don't think the operating system
or "editor" was worth much.
Sam
jmalone
>In article <35cbe384...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>>
>>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>
>You missed the editing capabilities.
Which are different to Words in which way?
> For text *entry* notepad is
>roughly the same as vi -- assuming you never make mistakes. But vi is
>much better than notepad as an editor. And, as someone else pointed
>out, the regex capabilities of vi blow Word out of the water.
No idea what _regex_ capabilitites are.
>
>>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>>out of the water!
>
>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>at hundreds of megabytes...
Well, for one, size really doens't matter much nowadays, does it. I
have a 1.2 gigayte hard drive (which is now considered small) and a
zip drive attached to that (with 100 megabyte disks).
>that can format your text for a laser printer....
Which is a good thing for my attached laser printer..
>But it's not much use for *writing*,
Why? It seems to _write_ for me....
If I write the sentence:
It was a dark, stormy night... (borrowed shamelessly from Snoopy)
it appears the same on my Word program, my notepad text editor and my
WinVi text editor....
now doesn't it?
>IMAO.
jmalone.
jmalone
jmalone
wrote:
<snip>-
>>There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
>>habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
>
>Some of us still have the dumb terminals.
Sorry to hear about that.
> As a UNIX system administrator,
Really sorry to hear about that.
>sometimes the only access I have to the massive servers here at work is
>through the dumb terminals that hook directly into the back of the machines.
>If you need to save a dieing system, and you don't have the convenience of
>a slick GUI to coddle you, you use what's left
I'm not sure I want to work for/do business with a company that
couldn't afford or wouldn't provide _slick GUI_'s for their employees.
>--and that's vi.
Ta-da!!! The _wave_ of the future!!! (just kidding <g>)
> I'd
>be completely lost without it here at work,
Hey, I know the feeling. I'd be just as lost without my slick GUI. As
a student, we have to have slick GUI's, its in the syllabus for each
class.....Buy these books, attend all lectures, turn in essays on
these days, must have slick GUI's.....no dumb terminals allowed !
> and I'm sure any other UNIX
>admin would tell you the same thing (except for those wierdos who use Emacs
>and pico--*shudder*)
(*shudder*)
>
>As much as they
You mean you, come on Dave, admit it. It's the big *I Hate Microsoft
Argument*
I Hate Microsoft because:
a) everybody else does; so I do. (but I won't admit that's the
reason)
b) cause Bill Gates has 85 billion dollars (today, at least) and I'm
jealous of him/that. (but I won't admit that's the reason)
c) I wish I'd invented Windows (but I won't admit that's the reason)
d) he's a ruthless businessman (Imagine that?) who does everything he
can to make his company the best in the business? (Now why would he do
that?) (but I won't admit that's the reason)
e) Windows (GUI) is the present and future of computing and it really
very cool (but I'll only admit that to myself) but I prefer to cling
to the past, using programs that are decades out of date (but I won't
admit that's the reason)
f) any other reason not mentioned here (but I _definitley_ won't admit
that's the reason)
> hate it,
No you don't. This is all a masterful ruse. You're a closet GUI freak.
Come on, you can tell us....we're you're friends....
> the world is not yet owned by Microsoft.
Give him time, give him time. Also, refer to the *I Hate Microsoft
Argument*; sections a thru e....f is optional.
> Some
>things can (and in many cases, must) be done at the command line on most
>any UNIX system you care to mention.
But I'd rather not.....because soon even that argument won't stand.
Think about it. What do you think computing will be like in, say. 25
years? Still gonna be using those command lines? 50 years? 100 years?
Things move forward.
> Again, as I said in another post, I
>don't wish to start a holy war here, so don't try to tell me that everything
>ought to be GUI in the first place (I've got about a bazillion reasons why
>that's simply a stupid idea, but I'll keep them to myself unless provoked.)
Now, now. Remember your blood pressure.
Well, although your *bazillion* reasons are most likely very correct
for today, you have to admit that the future of computing, ALL
computing is going to GU and voiceI, not command line. As much as you
would like to hold onto the past and cherish the _old reliables_, the
new always take ahold of the banner and marches forward, leaving the
old behind. That's just the way it is...in everything.
>>
<snip old programmers I've never heard of...>
>>
<snip>
>... then what you want is vi.
>Trust me.
Ah, David, but I _do_ trust you.
I trust your knowledge of computers _far_ outstrips mine in every
aspect.
I also think I'll stick with Microsoft Word.....even if everyone
hates/is jealous of/can find fault with (pick one) Microsoft, the
corporation......
The Evil Empire.......
>-- Dave
jmalone
jmalone
jmalone
<eosl...@net-link.net> wrote:
>Aahz Maruch wrote:
<snip old argument>
>> Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>> at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
>> But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
>
>If Works 4.0 had a bit more in the way of control over columns and had
>a capability for different layouts in different sections, I'd never
>use anything else.
I teach works at the University I attend (hey, helps to pay for rent)
<g>
> But, for some of what I write, layout and columns
>and borders and whatnot are absolutely vital. Therefore, I am a
>heathen, and use Word 97. Oh, I'm evil.
Oh, you evil, evil man.....shame on you and a pox on your bethren!
I, also, use Word97 (sigh, ok, I'll say it again) because _I like it_
....(double sigh)
At least I know I have _one_ friend out there......Thanks Kris!
>
>Kristopher/EOS
P.S. What's EOS?
jmalone
jmalone
wrote:
>This just in: aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) has made the following
>statement:
>
>
>>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>>at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
>>But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
>
>But _why_?
Because we're the heathans and they're the *keepers of the flame*.
Sheesh. Hang in here with us, Jon.
>Where have you got this idea that you can't *write* on
>anything except a basic text editor.
You go get'em Jon. See, now there are, um....three of us out there!
Me, Kristopher and Jon. Damn. We should start a club!
> I like writing on word
With a capital W, but Jon knew that; he just wanted to see if we were
listening....uh, sor Jon. Go ahead.
> because
>for years I've written straight onto paper and my handwriting has been
>so abysmal I like to write and see it come up neatly. It's perfectly
>useful for writing, it can also prepare what you write for sending off
>to publishers too.
Uh-oh. Now you've done it. now they're gonna tell you how much
*better* _they're program is for publishers.....and they don't ever
have to take their hands of the keyboard....ever.
>
> Jon
BTW. Bless you my son. Welcome to the group. Your turn to bring the
biscuts next time, though.
jmalone
Empress of Blandings
>On Sat, 8 Aug 1998 09:22:59 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
>wrote:
>>I don't care. Because I am putting out
>Which for me is about 30 words per minute, 20 if I actually want
>everything to be spelled correctly.
I'm in the high 80's. 90's when my fingers are limber.
>> which is pretty fast, and when I revise
>>I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard, ever.
>Whoa. Seems like an awful lot of trouble. Then again, I grew up with a
>mouse soldered to my right hand.
Actually, taking one's hands off the keyboard is more trouble.
[Hitting the 'Esc' key does not count as taking one's hands off the
keyboard, nyah. --Ed.]
>I'm also neither a touch typist or a very fast one. But I get by. I'm
>always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
>day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
>_later_.
I'm not sure why you're even bothering to evaluate vi. Just so you
can say "it sucks." You don't type very fast, you prefer using a
mouse, and you're running Windoze. vi is not the right program for
you.
Jon Poole
following statement:
>On Sat, 08 Aug 1998 21:50:10 GMT, j...@apathy.demon.co.uk (Jon Poole)
>wrote:
>
>>This just in: aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) has made the following
>>statement:
>>
>>
>>>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>>>at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
>>>But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
>>
>>But _why_?
>
>Because we're the heathans and they're the *keepers of the flame*.
>
>Sheesh. Hang in here with us, Jon.
Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
AFAIC (Yes, that is supposed to be a C) one can write on whatever one
wants. I always remember an interview with Sue Townsend who said that
despite being posessed of loads of technology she always found herself
drawn to the Kitchen table with a 2b pencil and pad of paper.
<snip some stuff>
>BTW. Bless you my son. Welcome to the group. Your turn to bring the
>biscuts next time, though.
Ummm, thank you, I've got some mouldy Jaffa Cakes, any good?
kens...@hotmail.com
> > useful for writing, it can also prepare what you write for sending off
> > to publishers too.
>
> what professional writers do, Word is massive overkill. Fiction
> publishers want double spaced, ragged-right 12 point Courier on one
> side of the page, with pages numbered, and italics indicated by
> underlining. That's all. Nearly any text editor can accomplish that,
> and some folks prefer one a bit more lightweight than Word.
You're not wrong, but I, for one, can't compose fiction in a Courier typeface.
Drives my eyes nuts. This is clearly a deep-rooted psych problem, since I
compose non-fiction in Courier all the time without a problem.
I also do other projects, frequently, that use simple tables, for example, so
I use Word a lot just for the simplicity of consistency. But Word has
zillions of features that I will never use simply because I have other,
smaller apps that do a much better job of handling them (like, HTML,
graphics, charts, etc).
And I'd be happier with a word processor that didn't have that stuff. MS
used to compartmentalize more, but I seem to be in the minority in banging
that drum these days.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
I bet a funny thing about driving a car off a cliff is, while you're in
midair, you still hit those brakes! Hey, better try the emergency brake!
kens...@hotmail.com
[snip]
> Ah, the good ole days. When Bill gates told us we'd _never_ need more
> than a 640k hard drive.....
Worse. Predictions in computers are usually way off, no matter who makes
them. (If you can get a computer magazine that's five years old, take a look
through it. Hilarious!) Bill was actually talking about RAM at a time when
I don't think much of anyone in *this* country, at least, had a hard drive of
any kind on a PC. I know I only had an IBM PC, and it booted off a big ole
floppy disk.
Per some computer magazine that I copied this from years ago, here's what Bill
supposedly said:
"Who in their right mind would ever need more than 640k of ram?"
-- Bill Gates, 1981
This ended up being a sore point, and this little lack of foresight--shared by
many people; I'm not just picking on Mr. Gates--actually still plagues Intel
(and compatible) machines to this date. These days, kernel memory in Windows
seems to be the hot memory problem, rather than the 640k of conventional RAM.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC (Digital), 1977
kens...@hotmail.com
> >
> >In the wacky world of computers, here's a more-or-less inescapable rule:
> > If you want the software to do more stuff for you, you have to give up some
> > of your control.
>
> Oh, yes, that's a very good expression of a basic truth.
Thanks. I had this explained to me when, as I child, I asked why you couldn't
"peek" and "poke" the Mac the way we used to with the (ha ha!) Commodore PET.
> >...VI ... is a power-user app, and unless you think it's
> >easy and/or fun to sit down and write shell script and yadda-yadda-yadda,
> >it's not for you.
>
> That's not quite true. I spent years trying to learn to handle
> shell scripts, and never really succeeded. (I can write a
> foreach command if the circumstances are *really*simple*.)
My brother told me, after I'd posted, that I was slightly off on that, too.
Ah well.
> >Another way of putting this is that VI is the kind of program that waits for
> >you to tell it exactly what you want it to do. Word thinks it knows
what you
> >want--and it's usually right.
>
> That's the problem, you see. It's usually *wrong.*
Well, no--it's *usually* right, but you only notice when it's wrong. It's
still wrong pretty damned often, often enough to be quite upsetting at times.
But if you click File | New, Word makes *lots* of basic assumptions about
what you want, and most of those assumptions will be correct most of the
time. That's the kind of thing I meant.
> > When Word is wrong, you have to argue with it.
> >When you don't know how to tell VI what you want it to do, you're stuck.
>
> You're saying the same thing two ways. When Word is wrong you
> have to find out how to tell it what to do. When vi is wrong you
> have to find out how to tell it what to do.
That's not quite what I meant. Word is a case of you-have-less-control.
Often, if Word guesses wrong about what you want, that's it--end of the line.
There often *isn't* a way to tell it to do exactly what you want, and you're
forced to compromise.
I have called MS many, many times over the years and spent very long periods
on the phone with very nice people who finally agreed that, no, you can't
quite do *that*, even with all the macro powers at your disposal. Sometimes,
after great difficulty and many lines of macro, I can come up with a kludge,
and sometimes I can't.
> It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
> baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
> and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
> and nothing else will ever seem as good?
There's some truth to this, of course, but, as with so many rules of thumb,
it's not hard and fast. I did my first word processing, such as it was, with
a spreadsheet program on an Apple II, and you had to switch to the next field
every sixteen characters. And it would only print one page at a time. God
knows I don't miss *that*.
There was a lot I liked about Volkswriter, the first real word processor I
used, but I do prefer an at least vaguely WYSIWYG interface. And I've long
since become accustomed to dark text on a light gray background, which I
couldn't stand on the tiny screens Mac's had.
> >Most people will add, "And never the twain shall meet," or somesuch. Ideally
> >(don't hold your breath), we will one day have self-programming (more or
less)
> >application packages that are as easy to use as Word but as easy to configure
> >and control as VI.
>
> And they'll run on Linux.
Probably, Linux will rule that world.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
Today's Word -- "balatron: a buffoon who acts the fool in public to attract
attention" Pronounced bal'-uh-tron.
Graydon
Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
>on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
mice and menus. For touch typists, this very commonly messes with
creative flow a great deal, by imposing a delay in the process of
getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form. Having to learn
that } means paragraph forward and ) means sentence forward and ]
means block forward is a small price to pay for that maintenance of
flow. One can even fiddle the delete-word command to leave the space
behind, or not, depending on what's more convient.
--
"But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty which produced
it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in
Faerie is more potent." -- "On Fairy-Stories", J.R.R. Tolkien
kens...@hotmail.com
j...@apathy.demon.co.uk (Jon Poole) wrote:
> This just in: jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> has made the
> following statement:
[snip]
> AFAIC (Yes, that is supposed to be a C) one can write on whatever one
> wants.
I give up. What does the "C" stand for? "Care"? "Conceive"? "Camber"?
"Climb"?
> I always remember an interview with Sue Townsend who said that despite being
> posessed of loads of technology she always found herself drawn to the Kitchen
> table with a 2b pencil and pad of paper.
Rock on, Sue! But where did she find a pencil with only 2b of RAM? The
cheapest pencil I can find have 12k.
Adrian Mole^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HJohn Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
I had intended to enclose my check with this letter, but I mistakenly sealed
the envelope before doing so, and so my payment will have to wait until my
next communication.
Dorothy J Heydt
>I have called MS many, many times over the years and spent very long periods
>on the phone with very nice people who finally agreed that, no, you can't
>quite do *that*, even with all the macro powers at your disposal....
It's not only Microsoft, of course. I remember one time, during
a period in my life when I had to use a Mac at work, calling up
Apple and asking where I could find QuickKeys (or equivalent)
that would work on the desktop too, so that I need never, ever,
use the mouse at all. The guy on the phone was astonished. Why
in the world would anybody not want to use the mouse?? It took
me many minutes of arguing to convince him that I really did
want never to use the mouse, and then he said, well, of *course*
there was no way of doing that.
I am so glad I don't have that job any more and don't have to use
that Mac any more.
David Joseph Greenbaum
inscribed in fleeting electrons:
: It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
: baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
: and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
: and nothing else will ever seem as good?
*Third* OS for me, Dorothy. First one was oogy-godawful Commodorewrite
on the C64. Yech. Splech. All of ten pages of memory/editing space.
And even all of the PEEK/POKE tinkering couldn't make it better. Second was
MacWrite on the Mac Plus. Almost as bad. Waiting minutes to load up and
tens of seconds to block text WYSIWYG was horrible.
And then came Wordperfect on my dad's office MS-unix box, and after that
came WordStar and Wordperfect on my own paper-route-income derived
MS-DOS machine. Which I am using *right* *now*.
It's still more flexible and controllable than any of the GUI wps', and
control of page formatting, text appearance, and important style options
exist entirely under my own control. And all of the macros I'll ever
need are set up, and if I ever want to do anything more I can. That, and
I memorized the WP5.1 manual a *long* time ago.
Dave G.
--
Such fragrance -
from where,
which tree?
Jon Poole
statement:
>In article <35d1fe24...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
>>on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
>
>Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>mice and menus. For touch typists, this very commonly messes with
>creative flow a great deal, by imposing a delay in the process of
>getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form. Having to learn
>that } means paragraph forward and ) means sentence forward and ]
>means block forward is a small price to pay for that maintenance of
>flow. One can even fiddle the delete-word command to leave the space
>behind, or not, depending on what's more convient.
Nonono, you still miss my point. Though that's wrong, ctl-whatever can
do whatever you want usually. As I've mentioned before I'm dyslexic
which often means going back over stuff I've written and moving
sentaces around to make them more understandable. but that's getting
side-tracked.
I was answering someone who seemed to be of the opinion that you
couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
Jon - Beginning to feel this discussion is
something of a molehill/mountain thing.
Jon Poole
kens...@hotmail.com has made the following statement:
>
>And I'd be happier with a word processor that didn't have that stuff. MS
>used to compartmentalize more, but I seem to be in the minority in banging
>that drum these days.
Well don't use them then. Word toolbars are very editable, All I have
'up' is The font descriptions and the justifying tools. Everything
else I need can be accessed from the keyboard. Except for click and
dragging text of course... but that's obvious.
Jon
--
An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but in my experience, so
does an air rifle... top bedroom window!
j...@apathy.demon.co.uk http://www.apathy.demon.co.uk/
jessie shelton
> Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
> it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
> mice and menus.
It's not as convenient as vi, but shortcuts do exist; for maneuvering, I
find that using the set of CTL{arrow key} and CTL{delete/backspace}
usually works tolerably for me. Diacriticals and font formatting I also
handle with shortcut keys (or autocorrect for accents). I don't like
having to move my fingers from the keyboard, but I do like having
WYSIWYG, italics, and diacriticals.
so.. it's not quite as clear of a dividing line as all that.
jessie
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
jessie shelton (one side of moebius)
shelton(AT)princeton.edu http://www.princeton.edu/~shelton
"Tick, clong, tick, clong, tick, clong, went the night."
- King Clode, _The White Deer_, Thurber
---------------------------------------------------------------
Berry Kercheval
> I was answering someone who seemed to be of the opinion that you
> couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone has asserted that with any
degree of authority. The gist of the argument seems to be that Word
has a great many features that are not _necessary_ for writing,
especially writing fiction, where double-spaced courier-12 is the
standard for manuscripts. Further, Word is seen to be touch-typist
unfriendly.
Professional fiction writers aren't, for the most part, interested in
desktop publishing. An editor that allows them to write, edit, move
paragraphs and so on, without moving from the home row, satisfies 95%
of their needs. They don't need or want real time spell checkers,
text flows aroung irregular graphics, or dancing paperclips.
Some folks, on the other hand, love Word and all its bells, whistles,
dogs and ponies. That's OK, as long as they don't insist we all use
it. ("Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated!")
That's the feelings I get from this discussion.
--berry
Berry Kercheval
> www.hawkida.demon.co.uk/southport.jpgThis just in:
> kens...@hotmail.com has made the following statement:
> >And I'd be happier with a word processor that didn't have that stuff. MS
> >used to compartmentalize more, but I seem to be in the minority in banging
> >that drum these days.
>
> Well don't use them then. Word toolbars are very editable, All I have
> 'up' is The font descriptions and the justifying tools. Everything
> else I need can be accessed from the keyboard. Except for click and
> dragging text of course... but that's obvious.
You seem to be missing the point. First of all, some folks don't WANT
to click and drag; anything that moves them off the home row SLOWS
THEM DOWN.
Second, even if you don't use all the features they're still there,
bloating up the code and providing a nice lurking place for nasty
bugs.
I just did a test on two similar Pentium machines. On the faster one
with Win95, Word took ten seconds to start up to the point I could
start typing at it. On the slower Pentium, running a version of BSD,
vi took less than a second.
Now, most people fire up the editor and then type at it for a while,
so in absolute terms start up speed is not much of an issue (I
typically start Emacs less than once a week, for instance.) My point
is that as a rough idea of how much code there is to get going, vi
wins. There's a lot of feature vi doesn't have, but people who use it
don't for the most part, need them or want them.
GO ahead and use Word; it has its good points. But don't try to
convert us.
--berry
Graydon
Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Nonono, you still miss my point. Though that's wrong, ctl-whatever can
>do whatever you want usually. As I've mentioned before I'm dyslexic
The subset of commands available through the keyboard is just that; a
subset of Word's commands. It's not the full range and it certainly
doesn't include all of what vim will do. ('put from here to the end
of the file in a new filed called _this_', all with keystroke
commands, as an example.)
>I was answering someone who seemed to be of the opinion that you
>couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
For some people (I'm one of them), that's true; Word puts them in a
state of blank despair or homicidal fury or whichever, and their
creative capacity is greatly reduced thereby.
Graydon
jessie shelton <shelton@princeton&spambane.edu> wrote:
>Graydon wrote:
>> Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>> it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>> mice and menus.
>
>It's not as convenient as vi, but shortcuts do exist; for maneuvering, I
>find that using the set of CTL{arrow key} and CTL{delete/backspace}
>usually works tolerably for me. Diacriticals and font formatting I also
Those are there, but even ancestral vi will allow for 3}, go forward
three paragraphs, or ), end of this sentence, and so on. Plus word
spanning motion commands that give one the option of arriving at the
beginning or the end of the word. One can do easily things that
aren't so easy with the standard control (or alt) grey cursor motion
keys.
>handle with shortcut keys (or autocorrect for accents). I don't like
>having to move my fingers from the keyboard, but I do like having
>WYSIWYG, italics, and diacriticals.
I don't like WYSIWIG, and won't until we get screen devices with
resolution comparable to the printing device, so it's not a horribly
misleading term. Diacriticals are easily available, through proper
selection of keybindings - é is not _as_ easy to type as e, since I
have to hit three keys to get it, but that's not so bad.
Italics is a question of available screen fonts, but isn't impossible.
(Although why one wants on-screen italics is one of those things that
baffles me a little.)
>so.. it's not quite as clear of a dividing line as all that.
It's not a completely pure case, no, but there is a real conceptual
ease issue; no one likes to use an editor or word processor that they
don't find intuitive. There is a wide and legitimate range to
'intuitive', obviously enough. I just get somewhat peeved at having
text-only tools regarded as primitive by some sort of a-prior nature.
David Palmer
fitc...@netaccess.co.nz wrote:
> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> >
> > It's not only Microsoft, of course. I remember one time, during
> > a period in my life when I had to use a Mac at work, calling up
> > Apple and asking where I could find QuickKeys (or equivalent)
> > that would work on the desktop too, so that I need never, ever,
> > use the mouse at all. The guy on the phone was astonished. Why
> > in the world would anybody not want to use the mouse?? It took
> > me many minutes of arguing to convince him that I really did
> > want never to use the mouse, and then he said, well, of *course*
> > there was no way of doing that.
>
> There are a limited number of things you can do on the desktop without a
> mouse. In case you ever need to use a Mac again, type in 'm' for example and
> "Macintosh HD" will be highlighted. If it highlights the wrong thing you can
> navigate between icons with the arrow keys. Then it's a matter of command-O
> to open, command-W to close and so on.
If you just type the first few letters of the the disk, you will get to the
right one. (If not, then tab to step forward alphabetically, shift-tab to
step back.)
There are things you can't easily do from the keyboard (unless you bring up
AppleScript). But there are things you can.
>
> I don't recommend command-E to eject the disk - it'll eject it alright, but
> leave the icon behind and the next time you put another disk in the computer
> will eject it and ask for the original disk.
Use put-away (clover-Y) to eject the disk without leaving a ghost.
> (It's possible, though
> difficult, to get into infinite rounds of swapping disks, which can only be
> broken by rebooting the darn computer.)
Clover-. stops it from asking for a disk. You will have to hit it a bunch
of times. You get into swappy-floppy-copy mode by trying to copy a floppy
to another floppy. It is symptomatic of the essential bozosity of Apple
(the company) that they don't fix the easy things to fix.
But getting back to your regularly scheduled flamewar, already in progress,
use what you want to use.
I helped to write Microsoft Word. (Version 1.0 for the PC and Version 1.0
for the Mac. They fit on single 320k and 400k floppies, respectively.) I
did most of the programming under vi. I still use vi. I still use
Microsoft Word (version 98). I use the right tool for the right job and
the adequate tool for the wrong job and brute force where that kind of
finesse is needed.
--
David Palmer dmpa...@clark.net
http://www.clark.net/pub/dmpalmer/
Avi Bar-Zeev
>The subset of commands available through the keyboard is just that; a
>subset of Word's commands. It's not the full range and it certainly
>doesn't include all of what vim will do. ('put from here to the end
>of the file in a new filed called _this_', all with keystroke
>commands, as an example.)
Word97 (from memory):
shift+control + page-down (selects from here to end)
control-c (to copy, or control-x to cut )
alt-f, n, enter (new file, I think ctrl-n works too)
ctrl-v (paste)
ctrl-s, <filename>, enter (save it)
Not too bad.
Since I can access all of the menus from the keyboard, I
can pretty much do everything in word from the keyboard. The
only thing I use the mouse for is the cool Document Map feature
that lets me jump around from scene to scene very quickly.
And, just to put my two shekels in, the only thing I hated about
VI et al was that I'd frequently mistype one character in a long
:command sequence and have to do the _whole_ thing over again.
Doing sequences a step at a time in Word is much easier for me.
Avi
Jonathan W Hendry
> In a fit of divine composition, Dorothy J Heydt (djh...@kithrup.com)
> inscribed in fleeting electrons:
> : It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
> : baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
> : and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
> : and nothing else will ever seem as good?
> *Third* OS for me, Dorothy. First one was oogy-godawful Commodorewrite
> on the C64. Yech. Splech. All of ten pages of memory/editing space.
> And even all of the PEEK/POKE tinkering couldn't make it better. Second was
> MacWrite on the Mac Plus. Almost as bad. Waiting minutes to load up and
> tens of seconds to block text WYSIWYG was horrible.
My first editor was probably whatever on-line editor CompuServe
used back in the mid-80's. Never used it for anything more than
e-mail. In high school, a few years later, I moved up to
AppleWorks on an Apple II, and later to a GUI wordprocessor
called 'MultiScribe', also for the II.
Needless to say, none of these are readily available now. ;)
--
Note: email to this address goes to /dev/null
To email a reply, write to jon at exnext dot com
David J. Parker
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>On 8 Aug 1998 20:09:25 GMT, big...@dillinger.io.com (David J. Parker)
>wrote:
>
><snip>-
>>>There is simply no reason, other than force of _very_ old
>>>habit, to keep on using an editor designed for a dumb terminal.
>>
>>Some of us still have the dumb terminals.
>
>Sorry to hear about that.
Why be sorry? I'm not. GUI's are nice, but I can't tell you the number of
times I've had to reboot our Windows NT servers here at work for something
trivial just because the system had hiccuped enough to make the GUI unusable,
even from the system console. I've only been locked out of the system
console on our UNIX machines once in four years.
>
>> As a UNIX system administrator,
>
>Really sorry to hear about that.
Again, don't be sorry. But here's a quick quiz. If you want to give
a hundred people access to one server to do things like word processing,
email, program development, and varios other things, and you also want to
have a stable system with zero desktop administration, what OS do you run
on that server? That's a no brainer--you run UNIX. NT simply couldn't handle
that situation. But I digress.
>
>>sometimes the only access I have to the massive servers here at work is
>>through the dumb terminals that hook directly into the back of the machines.
>>If you need to save a dieing system, and you don't have the convenience of
>>a slick GUI to coddle you, you use what's left
>
>I'm not sure I want to work for/do business with a company that
>couldn't afford or wouldn't provide _slick GUI_'s for their employees.
>
We got 'em. It's called X-Windows, and the occaisional Win95/NT machine.
I'm not talking about users. I'm talking about me, the administrator.
Like I said, the GUI is nice, but it is a big hindrance when it stops working
and there is simply no other way to access the system.
>>--and that's vi.
>
>Ta-da!!! The _wave_ of the future!!! (just kidding <g>)
>
>> I'd
>>be completely lost without it here at work,
>
>Hey, I know the feeling. I'd be just as lost without my slick GUI. As
>a student, we have to have slick GUI's, its in the syllabus for each
>class.....Buy these books, attend all lectures, turn in essays on
>these days, must have slick GUI's.....no dumb terminals allowed !
>
Um, what is your point here anyway?
>
>> and I'm sure any other UNIX
>>admin would tell you the same thing (except for those wierdos who use Emacs
>>and pico--*shudder*)
>
>(*shudder*)
>>
>>As much as they
>
>You mean you, come on Dave, admit it. It's the big *I Hate Microsoft
>Argument*
>
>I Hate Microsoft because:
>
>a) everybody else does; so I do. (but I won't admit that's the
>reason)
>
>b) cause Bill Gates has 85 billion dollars (today, at least) and I'm
>jealous of him/that. (but I won't admit that's the reason)
>
>c) I wish I'd invented Windows (but I won't admit that's the reason)
>
>d) he's a ruthless businessman (Imagine that?) who does everything he
>can to make his company the best in the business? (Now why would he do
>that?) (but I won't admit that's the reason)
>
>e) Windows (GUI) is the present and future of computing and it really
>very cool (but I'll only admit that to myself) but I prefer to cling
>to the past, using programs that are decades out of date (but I won't
>admit that's the reason)
>
>f) any other reason not mentioned here (but I _definitley_ won't admit
>that's the reason)
No, you forgot option g:
g) because it's an inferior product that is getting ramme ddown my throat
because of superior marketing and market clout.
GUI *is* the way computers are heading, and I don't doubt that or hate it.
But until the systems become stable enough to insure me I'm going to have
access to the system through that GUI at all times, I want a command line.
>
>> hate it,
>
>No you don't. This is all a masterful ruse. You're a closet GUI freak.
>Come on, you can tell us....we're you're friends....
>
>> the world is not yet owned by Microsoft.
>
>Give him time, give him time. Also, refer to the *I Hate Microsoft
>Argument*; sections a thru e....f is optional.
>
>
>> Some
>>things can (and in many cases, must) be done at the command line on most
>>any UNIX system you care to mention.
>
>But I'd rather not.....because soon even that argument won't stand.
>Think about it. What do you think computing will be like in, say. 25
>years? Still gonna be using those command lines? 50 years? 100 years?
>Things move forward.
>
>> Again, as I said in another post, I
>>don't wish to start a holy war here, so don't try to tell me that everything
>>ought to be GUI in the first place (I've got about a bazillion reasons why
>>that's simply a stupid idea, but I'll keep them to myself unless provoked.)
>
>Now, now. Remember your blood pressure.
>
>Well, although your *bazillion* reasons are most likely very correct
>for today, you have to admit that the future of computing, ALL
>computing is going to GU and voiceI, not command line. As much as you
>would like to hold onto the past and cherish the _old reliables_, the
>new always take ahold of the banner and marches forward, leaving the
>old behind. That's just the way it is...in everything.
My number one reason (out of a bazillion) why total GUI is a dumb idea
is that it's just one more thing to get between me and the computer when I
need to really fix it. If you can't understand that, then fine.
Like I said before, until GUI becomes as reliable as CLI, it's simply a bad
idea to have it be the only way to access the system.
>>>
><snip old programmers I've never heard of...>
>>>
><snip>
>
>>... then what you want is vi.
>>Trust me.
>
> Ah, David, but I _do_ trust you.
>
>I trust your knowledge of computers _far_ outstrips mine in every
>aspect.
>
>I also think I'll stick with Microsoft Word.....even if everyone
>hates/is jealous of/can find fault with (pick one) Microsoft, the
>corporation......
That's fine. I never told you to change. I also specifically said I'd never
recommend vi to anyone who didn't already have a need for it.
Personally, I use either vi or Wordperfect. I had Word 97 for awhile, but it
took up way too much space on my hard disk.
-- Dave
David J. Parker
>In article <ExEnp...@kithrup.com>, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
>wrote:
>> baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
>> and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
>> and nothing else will ever seem as good?
>
>The first I used for more than a cursory amount of time
>was an IBM APL system, and I don't think the operating system
>or "editor" was worth much.
>
>Sam
The first editor I used to write prose was TRIO on my old Commodore 64.
It sucked. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to it now.
I guess the word processor that finally did imprint was WordPerfect 5.1
I still use it for most everything, although I'm considering a move to WP 8.
-- Dave
Zeborah
>
> It's not only Microsoft, of course. I remember one time, during
> a period in my life when I had to use a Mac at work, calling up
> Apple and asking where I could find QuickKeys (or equivalent)
> that would work on the desktop too, so that I need never, ever,
> use the mouse at all. The guy on the phone was astonished. Why
> in the world would anybody not want to use the mouse?? It took
> me many minutes of arguing to convince him that I really did
> want never to use the mouse, and then he said, well, of *course*
> there was no way of doing that.
There are a limited number of things you can do on the desktop without a
mouse. In case you ever need to use a Mac again, type in 'm' for example and
"Macintosh HD" will be highlighted. If it highlights the wrong thing you can
navigate between icons with the arrow keys. Then it's a matter of command-O
to open, command-W to close and so on.
I don't recommend command-E to eject the disk - it'll eject it alright, but
leave the icon behind and the next time you put another disk in the computer
will eject it and ask for the original disk. (It's possible, though
difficult, to get into infinite rounds of swapping disks, which can only be
broken by rebooting the darn computer.)
Zeborah
Zeborah
>
> In article <6qk0l4$3a6$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, <pa...@webnexus.com> wrote:
> >In article <ExEnp...@kithrup.com>, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
> >wrote:
> >> It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the
> >> baby duck syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use,
> >> and the first editor you use, imprints on your nervous system
> >> and nothing else will ever seem as good?
> >
> >I don't remember the first editor or operating system I used.
> >The first I used for more than a cursory amount of time
> >was an IBM APL system, and I don't think the operating system
> >or "editor" was worth much.
My first computer - the Apple IIe. Now there was a computer. We had whole
disk boxes (5 1/2'') full of games, which you ran by typing in "RUN BOLO" or,
for some programs, "BRUN TAIPAN". I remember writing programs in Basic, which
astounded all the computer guys in a competition I entered - not because they
were great programs, but because they didn't realise you could do that sort of
thing in little ol' Basic.
(It took me ages to get my head around a program that didn't need line
numbers, and I can still only do a bit of Hypertalk. <snort>)
The Apple IIe did have a word processor of sorts, which we used from time to
time. I wouldn't go back to it. For one thing, I'm pretty sure it was just
plain text, and it would be a huge kerfuffle to get it to a more modern
computer to change it into Courier 12pt with underlines at appropriate places.
But I'm definitely used to Apple Macintoshes, and ClarisWorks.
Zeborah
Kristopher/EOS
One of my projects is a role-playing game I've been designing from
scratch, system and all, with a handful of other people. I need to do
layout and see what I'm going to print. I need to know, with a glance
at the screen, how thigns will look, what lines are in what font and
style, and so on. Word does a good job of that. Now, when the time
comes to go to print, we'll have to convert the files to Adobe, but
one of us has that, and all of us have Office 97.
As for my other writing, I've used Works, and now Word, for all of it,
and I like it. (I'm an evil, evil man, I know).
Kristopher/EOS
Aahz Maruch
jessie shelton <shelton@princeton&spambane.edu> wrote:
>Graydon wrote:
>>
>> Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>> it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>> mice and menus.
>
>It's not as convenient as vi, but shortcuts do exist; for maneuvering, I
>find that using the set of CTL{arrow key} and CTL{delete/backspace}
>usually works tolerably for me.
Arrow keys require one to move one's fingers away from the real
keyboard (aka the home keys).
--
--- Aahz (@netcom.com)
Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 <*> -=> http://www.rahul.net/aahz
Androgynous poly kinky vanilla queer het
What if there were no rhetorical questions?
Aahz Maruch
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>On Sat, 8 Aug 1998 15:44:02 GMT, aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
>>In article <35cbe384...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>>
>>You missed the editing capabilities.
>
>Which are different to Words in which way?
You were referring to Notepad, now you're referring to Word. Let's not
get this conversation mixed up.
>> For text *entry* notepad is
>>roughly the same as vi -- assuming you never make mistakes. But vi is
>>much better than notepad as an editor. And, as someone else pointed
>>out, the regex capabilities of vi blow Word out of the water.
>
>No idea what _regex_ capabilitites are.
Regular expressions. Let's suppose you're writing about a family named
Willow, but you decide you want to change the family's name to Rowan.
However, you've also got some willow trees. The following regex would
do almost what you want:
:set noic
:%s/\([A-Z][^ ]+\) Willow/\1 Rowan/g
:set ic
The first and third commands, of course, are optional if you're not in
ignorecase mode.
>>>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>>>out of the water!
>>
>>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>>at hundreds of megabytes...
>
>Well, for one, size really doens't matter much nowadays, does it. I
>have a 1.2 gigayte hard drive (which is now considered small) and a
>zip drive attached to that (with 100 megabyte disks).
Sometimes a floppy drive is the only LCD.
Aahz Maruch
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the baby duck
>syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use, and the first
>editor you use, imprints on your nervous system and nothing else will
>ever seem as good?
Bullshit. I started with BASIC on an HP-1000 with its corresponding
lack of an editor, then moved to CP/M and Wordstar (heavily reinforced
with years of TurboPascal even after I switched to WordPerfect). I've
also used Word as a professional tech writer, with an earlier stop in
Ventura. Now I truck with Unix and vi.
I'm one of the (relatively) few people entitled to have an opinion, in
Harlan's sense of the word.
Aahz Maruch
>
>You're not wrong, but I, for one, can't compose fiction in a Courier
>typeface. Drives my eyes nuts. This is clearly a deep-rooted psych
>problem, since I compose non-fiction in Courier all the time without a
>problem.
There's no reason you can't change your terminal font to something other
than Courier when you're using vi. ;-)
Aahz Maruch
>>http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
>
>Can't; I don't have web access.
Why not? Have whoever's your sysadmin install Lynx.
Aahz Maruch
Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>This just in: aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) has made the following
>statement:
>>
>>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>>But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
>
>But _why_? Where have you got this idea that you can't *write* on
>anything except a basic text editor. I like writing on word because
>for years I've written straight onto paper and my handwriting has been
>so abysmal I like to write and see it come up neatly. It's perfectly
>useful for writing, it can also prepare what you write for sending off
>to publishers too.
I'll admit that I'm not up to the blazing speeds of Piglet or Dorothy
(poking along at 30-50 wpm), but it still takes too much time to have
separate editing and writing keys. I've used many different word
processors over the years; I actually used word processors before I ever
touched vi. And vi just makes my life so much easier.
Aahz Maruch
>always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
>day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
>_later_.
Well, if you want to save time, that's one big way to do it. Makes it a
lot easier to spend your time on the Net. On second thought, I'm not
sure I really want to see more posts from you.
Kristopher/EOS
written for Windows run on a UNIX system, preferably in a shell in
X-Windows. I still miss the command-line base. No matter what went
wrong in the GUI (win 3.11, and that wasn't ever much) I could always
count on DOS 6.xx to be stable and reliable.
Windows95 is a mental case, but I confess to liking Office 97, and
having a games fetish.
Kristopher/EOS
Graydon
Kristopher/EOS <eosl...@net-link.net> wrote:
>One of my projects is a role-playing game I've been designing from
>scratch, system and all, with a handful of other people. I need to do
>layout and see what I'm going to print. I need to know, with a glance
>at the screen, how thigns will look, what lines are in what font and
>style, and so on. Word does a good job of that. Now, when the time
>comes to go to print, we'll have to convert the files to Adobe, but
>one of us has that, and all of us have Office 97.
I've done a fair bit of desktop publishing type stuff; _nothing_
WYSIWIG is really WYSIWIG, they're all This Is As Close As The Screen
Will Go; pixel width lines are a great way of finding this out,
becuase where the screen shows them stopping and where they actually
stop when printed won't necessarily match.
I don't deny that it's _convienent_ to be able to screen-preview things,
but it's not an adequate replacement for a test printing, and I
dislike marketing efforts that imply that it is.
>As for my other writing, I've used Works, and now Word, for all of it,
>and I like it. (I'm an evil, evil man, I know).
The strongest _I'll_ go is 'subject to unnecessary expense'.
pa...@webnexus.com
<d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
> No idea what _regex_ capabilitites are.
Regular expressions are a fairly powerful method for specifying
search expressions.
I consider Microsoft Word to be a power tool for building
twelve page letters--which is what 99.9% of its users probably
use it for.
I have used it to write and maintain 500 page technical
specifications, 200 page user manuals, 150 page collections
of "man"-style reference pages etc. And for those purposes,
in my professional opinion, it is not an adequate tool.
I have so informed my bosses in the past.
vi isn't, by itself, but it can be used as part of a collection
of tools which can, which is part of its power. Microsoft tools
often don't integrate with others. Sometimes they integrate
with other Microsoft tools.
> If I write the sentence:
> It was a dark, stormy night... (borrowed shamelessly from Snoopy)
Hopefully you know that Snoopy was not the originator of this phrase...
> it appears the same on my Word program, my notepad text editor and my
> WinVi text editor....
> now doesn't it?
Once you write text, you need to edit it. Word forces your hands
from the home row for all but the actual text entry. Some people
don't like this. Word can be very slow--I've seen it take minutes
to respond to a keypress or a mouse click on a fast computer
with lots of memory (Pentium II 300 with 256MB)--an extreme case.
Word isn't very reliable, even on Windows NT. I've had Word corrupt
inserted graphical objects into gibberish, and have had documents
where if you scrolled to a particular point in the text, it would
crash and wouldn't work again on that document until you rebooted
(recovering that document was _fun_).
Some people find WYSIWYG to be annoying and distracting from
their goal of well structured documents. There was a study,
I think from some UI people at Bell Labs many years ago,
which found that using a structured document formatting
system was more productive than WYSIWYG.
Some people find vi's modal nature, the text entry vs. cursor
movement vs. extended commands, to be a plus (I don't). Text
editors like vi doesn't mangle text into a form that only the
word processor can use, so you can use vi as an integral tool
with the extended operating system environment, instead of
having to rely only on what is built into the word processor.
Sam Paik
who has used more editors and word processors in more
environments than he wants to think about.
Oh, I'm not a tech writer either
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum
Jeff Johnson
>Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>mice and menus. For touch typists, this very commonly messes with
>creative flow a great deal, by imposing a delay in the process of
>getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form. Having to learn
>that } means paragraph forward and ) means sentence forward and ]
>means block forward is a small price to pay for that maintenance of
>flow. One can even fiddle the delete-word command to leave the space
>behind, or not, depending on what's more convient.
Word does have keyboard equivalents for everything you mention, and I
think they're easier to learn and remember. And all the menus are
operatable with the keyboard as well.
Paragraph forward: CTRL+DOWN Arrow
Paragraph up: CTRL+UP Arrow
Word forward:CTRL+RIGHT Arrow
Word backward: CTRL+LEFT Arrow
Adding shift to any of these selects text instead of just moving the
cursor.
Word has extensive keyboard shortcuts, far more than mentioned here.
The biggest reason people shouldn't use GUI editors is if the program
can't keep up to their typing speed (ie can only display 30wpm typing
while you can type faster, so that you get too far ahead of the
program). This varies on different versions of Word and different
hardware. I can't type too fast for Word 97 on my home PC, but can on
a PS/2 55 running Word 6.
Jeff Johnson
jsjo...@islandnet.com
Cthulhu '97 - Why vote for the lesser evil ?
Jeff Johnson
>In article <35cd667f...@news.usq.edu.au>, jmalone
><d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>> No idea what _regex_ capabilitites are.
>
>Regular expressions are a fairly powerful method for specifying
>search expressions.
Word does support most of what you can do with regular expressions.
I'm not sure what you can't do. Word just calls 'em 'wildcard
searches'.
>vi isn't, by itself, but it can be used as part of a collection
>of tools which can, which is part of its power. Microsoft tools
>often don't integrate with others. Sometimes they integrate
>with other Microsoft tools.
Word (and all the current Office apps) can be controlled via OLE
Automation from any compatible tool, including the VBScript built in
to Windows 98.
You can build things out of parts of GUI Windows apps, it just isn't
the same type of process as with pipes and filters.
Gareth Wilson
> My first computer - the Apple IIe. Now there was a computer. We had whole
> disk boxes (5 1/2'') full of games, which you ran by typing in "RUN BOLO" or,
> for some programs, "BRUN TAIPAN". I remember writing programs in Basic, which
> astounded all the computer guys in a competition I entered - not because they
> were great programs, but because they didn't realise you could do that sort of
> thing in little ol' Basic.
We had a _clone_ of an Apple IIe, a "Laser". It had little triangles
instead of apples..
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gareth Wilson
Christchurch
New Zealand
e-mail gr...@student.canterbury.ac.nz
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kens...@hotmail.com
>
> >I have called MS many, many times over the years and spent very long periods
> >on the phone with very nice people who finally agreed that, no, you can't
> >quite do *that*, even with all the macro powers at your disposal....
>
> It's not only Microsoft, of course.
No, of course; I was (as I'm sure you realize) making a point in the
difference between software of the VI / Word design families.
> I remember one time, during a period in my life when I had to use a Mac at
> work, calling up Apple and asking where I could find QuickKeys (or equivalent)
> that would work on the desktop too, so that I need never, ever, use the mouse
> at all.
I know. Isn't the keyboard a million times faster? People here are always
asking me how to do stuff in Word, and when I do simple things like save just
by hitting key combinations, they always make me go back and do it again, to
demonstrate. And then they say, "What a pain." But I get Word to jump
through hoops much faster than they do.
Hot Tip, for those still using Win 3x: If you don't like the hotkeys that
are assigned by MS (or whomever), just change them. Use a hex editor (like
the one that comes with Norton Utilities, for instance), and search for the
command whose letter you want to change. There will be an ampersand before
the hotkey. Change where the ampersand is, and you change which letter is
the hotkey.
Back up the application you're changing first, of course. It's amazing, but
this works. It doesn't even matter if some other command in the same menu
has the same hotkey you've just assigned; pressing that key will simply jump
between the two commands on the menu.
This is good for all of us who hate it when MS assigns "W" as the hotkey for
File | New (as they did with Explorer), even though "N" is unassigned.
(What's with that?)
I haven't tried this with Win 95 yet. I'm still having too many other
problems to iron out to mess around. But I use it all the time at home.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
kens...@hotmail.com
j...@apathy.demon.co.uk (Jon Poole) wrote:
> www.hawkida.demon.co.uk/southport.jpgThis just in:
> kens...@hotmail.com has made the following statement:
>
> >
> >And I'd be happier with a word processor that didn't have that stuff. MS
> >used to compartmentalize more, but I seem to be in the minority in banging
> >that drum these days.
>
> Well don't use them then. Word toolbars are very editable, All I have
> 'up' is The font descriptions and the justifying tools. Everything
> else I need can be accessed from the keyboard. Except for click and
> dragging text of course... but that's obvious.
I never use the Drag'n'Drop; don't need it. I *do* customize toolbars, and I
really, really wish I could have properly imported all my customizations from
Word 6 to Word 97 (and I have suggested this to MS before). It takes forever
to draw all those specialized toolbar buttons all over again, and you can't
just import normal icons....
But I want to jettison lots more than just some foolish toolbars. I want to
dump the HTML gunk, the drawing stuff, the charts, the equation editor, the
Assistant, and lots of other stuff I can't think of at the moment. Some you
can get rid of, more or less, at this time; some you can't. And I'd like to
add proper support for styles and templates, and better organization of
things like templates, fonts, etc, etc.
It's more than just not using this stuff. The more complex they make the
software, the more problematic it becomes. That's a rule of thumb, and it
seems well borne out in this particular instance. In my experience, Word 97
crashes more than Word 6, which crashed more than Word 2. Anything that
breaks the flow of my writing is hard to forgive.
kens...@hotmail.com
goo...@interlog.com wrote:
> In article <6qleue$h6r$2...@cnn.Princeton.EDU>,
> jessie shelton <shelton@princeton&spambane.edu> wrote:
> >Graydon wrote:
> (Although why one wants on-screen italics is one of those things that
> baffles me a little.)
I, personally, like to see the text on-screen as close to how I imagine it
will look on a printed page as possible. If I didn't know that editors and
typesetters and other would thwart me, I'd set my page size to mirror the
paperback format (I don't have my sights set *too* high) and go for visual
aesthetics as well. Not that I ever worked on a newspaper.
But I can understand why other people aren't interested.
kens...@hotmail.com
aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
> In article <6qleue$h6r$2...@cnn.Princeton.EDU>,
> jessie shelton <shelton@princeton&spambane.edu> wrote:
> >Graydon wrote:
> >>
> >> it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
> >> mice and menus.
> >
> >find that using the set of CTL{arrow key} and CTL{delete/backspace}
> >usually works tolerably for me.
>
> Arrow keys require one to move one's fingers away from the real
> keyboard (aka the home keys).
Yeah, but I can hit those keys--and return to home row--without looking at the
keyboard. In other words, I can use the arrow keys *while* I'm touch-typing.
On the other hand, I wish MS hadn't gotten everyone to put "Win 95" keys on
the keyboard--especially since they duplicate the ctrl-esc combination. The
context-sensitive-menu (ie, "right click") button, though, that was a
godsend. Who'd've expected MS to go out of their way to make new mouse
functionality duplicated on the keyboard?
Or did someone else start the right-click keyboard button trend? Apple
doesn't count as an answer; we all know they did this stuff before MS.
kens...@hotmail.com
> >
> >I'm also neither a touch typist or a very fast one. But I get by. I'm
> >always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
> >day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
> >_later_.
>
> Well, if you want to save time, that's one big way to do it. Makes it a
> lot easier to spend your time on the Net. On second thought, I'm not
> sure I really want to see more posts from you.
Ooooh...so mean. Seriously, jmalone, learning to touch type can make all the
difference in the world--more of a difference than you'd imagine. It was a
required course for freshman at the high school I went to, and teachers
subsequently required that all papers were typed. I realize this won't work
in all situations (it's unfair to students who don't have equal access to
typewriters and word processors, for instance), but it was a step in the
right direction.
As it is, I go nuts when the fires are burnin' and I can't get the text onto
the screen fast enough.... And I type pretty fast.
kens...@hotmail.com
> >syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use, and the first
> >editor you use, imprints on your nervous system and nothing else will
> >ever seem as good?
>
> Bullshit.
I think Dorothy was only offering this concept for discussion, not asserting
it as it Trvth.
> I'm one of the (relatively) few people entitled to have an opinion, in
> Harlan's sense of the word.
Can I ask what that means? I confess unfeigned ignorance.
kens...@hotmail.com
jsjo...@islandnet.com (Jeff Johnson) wrote:
> gra...@gooroos.com (Graydon) wrote:
>
> >Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
> >it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
> >creative flow a great deal, by imposing a delay in the process of
> >getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form. Having to learn
> >that } means paragraph forward and ) means sentence forward and ]
> >means block forward is a small price to pay for that maintenance of
> >flow. One can even fiddle the delete-word command to leave the space
> >behind, or not, depending on what's more convient.
>
> Word does have keyboard equivalents for everything you mention, and I
> think they're easier to learn and remember. And all the menus are
> operatable with the keyboard as well.
>
> Paragraph forward: CTRL+DOWN Arrow
> Paragraph up: CTRL+UP Arrow
MS changed these in Word 97, or at least in the version I have.... I changed
it back, though--that was, at least, easy enough.
> Word has extensive keyboard shortcuts, far more than mentioned here.
And you can usually add more at will. Unfortunately, MS has never properly
supported protable configurations, so if you switch to a new machine or
upgrade Word, you have to reconfigure all over again (or put up with a
different configuration).
kens...@hotmail.com
pa...@webnexus.com wrote:
> In article <35cd667f...@news.usq.edu.au>, jmalone
> <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
> > If I write the sentence:
> > It was a dark, stormy night... (borrowed shamelessly from Snoopy)
>
> Hopefully you know that Snoopy was not the originator of this phrase...
I believe, also, that it's "It was a dark and stormy night...." Sorry. Bit
obsessive and pedantic of me, perhaps, but there it is.
> Word can be very slow--I've seen it take minutes to respond to a keypress or a
> mouse click on a fast computer with lots of memory (Pentium II 300 with
> 256MB)--an extreme case. Word isn't very reliable, even on Windows NT. I've
> had Word corrupt inserted graphical objects into gibberish, and have had
> documents where if you scrolled to a particular point in the text, it would
> crash and wouldn't work again on that document until you rebooted
> (recovering that document was _fun_).
Yup, yup, yup. Been there, done that. But what I hate most (well, probably)
is the way Word sucks up system resources--and doesn't even give them back
when you close it.
Try this: Check your system resources after starting Windows. Open Word,
open a file, close Word. Repeat three times. Check your system resources.
On about half to two-thirds of the systems I've tried this on, the "system
resources" drop from about 92% to about 70-75%, even though you'll now have
no apps running. I've seen this problem with every version of Word from 2.0b
(at least) through Word 97 SR-1.
Word takes kernel memory but doesn't release it properly. This is something
MS is well aware of.
And--best of all--Windows exaggerates the system resources situation. Once
"system resources" drop below about 75%, you start getting memory problems
galore, in most cases that I've seen. One guy in this office had his system
set up so that he could keep working normally even when they dropped to about
60%, but that's the only time I've seen that. On most systems I've used,
everything starts crashing at 70%, for sure.
So, if I use Word and then close it, I often have to close and restart
Windows--even Win 97--before I can safely restart Word. *That* is a pain in
the ass.
jmalone
>
>>Whoa. Seems like an awful lot of trouble. Then again, I grew up with a
>>mouse soldered to my right hand.
>
>Actually, taking one's hands off the keyboard is more trouble.
Your _opinion_, not mine.
>[Hitting the 'Esc' key does not count as taking one's hands off the
>keyboard, nyah. --Ed.]
Niether does crtl + (any key you wish to name) for shortcut keys, just
like doing things in Vi; imagine that? And I _never_ have to take my
hands from the keyboard.
>
>>I'm also neither a touch typist or a very fast one. But I get by. I'm
>>always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
>>day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
>>_later_.
>
>I'm not sure why you're even bothering to evaluate vi.
Because I've been watching everyone talk about what a wonderful
program it is, so I'd thought I'd try it. Of course, I've already said
this in _several_ previous posts which you would have known if you'd
bothered paying attention.
> Just so you
>can say "it sucks."
(Sigh) Look, before you blather off like an idiot, perhaps you could
go back and review those posts, hmm?
Ooops. Looks like you're blathering. Your funeral.
> You don't type very fast,
No?! Wha...How 'd you guess?? Such a sharp, perceptive mind!
>you prefer using a
>mouse,
Nothing gets by you. Very impressive.
>and you're running Windoze.
Oh, my, that's very good. Windoze. Make that one up all by yourself,
did you. Tax that little mind of yours?
> vi is not the right program for
>you.
And the sky opens up!
We figured this out about eleven posts back.
Write again when you figure out that I _like_ Microsoft and really
enjoy using both MSWord and Office.....(things I said _twenty_ posts
back.)
In other words. Don't waste my time.
>--
> ____
>Piglet \bi/ Momentum! A paying market for metrical poetry.
>pig...@piglet.org \/ http://www.piglet.org/momentum
jmalone
jmalone
>In article <35d1fe24...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
>>on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
>
>Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
You mean like ctrl-x (cut), ctrl-v (paste), crtl-s (save) ctrl-z
(undo), ctrl-y (redo), drone, drone, drone.....
>it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>mice and menus.
Except for those of us who know how.....
>For touch typists,
May they be revered...hummmmmmh.
> this very commonly messes with creative flow a great deal,
As opposed to us non-touch typists who obviously don't _have_ any
creative flow, hmm?
>by imposing a delay in the process of
>getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form.
And for those of us that don't put everything down that way, you'll
explain our method in which way?
>Having to learn
>that } means paragraph forward
...or that crl-o means to open a pre-existing document....
> and )
....and that crtl-arrow will highligh a certain amount of text or that
ctrl-] increases font point size....drone, drone, drone....
>means sentence forward and ]
>means block forward is a small price to pay for that maintenance of
>flow.
In which you can _flow_ just as easily in Word as in Vi with more
shortcut key functions so you don't _ever_ have to take your little
fingers off the keyboard, therby preserving that which we non-touch
typists revere about you...... your _creative flow_.
>One can even fiddle the delete-word command to leave the space
>behind, or not, depending on what's more convient.
drone, drone, drone......
>--
>"But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty which produced
>it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in
>Faerie is more potent." -- "On Fairy-Stories", J.R.R. Tolkien
jmalone
jmalone
wrote:
> The gist of the argument seems to be that Word
>has a great many features that are not _necessary_ for writing,
Depends on what _kind_ of writing you're talking about. I happen to
find it immensley helpful while writing essays for school as well as
for writing sf.....What I asserted many, many posts ago was that
_nowhere_ on the Word 97 box does it say : produced soley for writing
fiction. It is a _word proccessor_, marketed to provide many functions
for many _different_ writing styles and tasks. Nobody can seem to get
past this simple fact.
>especially writing fiction, where double-spaced courier-12 is the
>standard for manuscripts. Further, Word is seen to be touch-typist
>unfriendly.
That, my friend is a base libel, as we in the Word camp have been
proving over and over again in our many posts. There are just as many
function keys and _customisable_ function keys in Word as are in Vi,
probably more.
>
>Professional fiction writers aren't, for the most part, interested in
>desktop publishing.
Niether are students who use it for essays, nor mothers who use it for
letter-writing, nor executive who use it for memos, nor office
assistants who use it for corporate text, drone on....
>An editor that allows them to write, edit, move
>paragraphs and so on, without moving from the home row, satisfies 95%
>of their needs.
It is a matter of personal taste and you know it.
>They don't need or want real time spell checkers,
>text flows <snip>
Who are they? Do presume to speak for me or my writing group.
>
>Some folks, on the other hand, love Word and all its bells, whistles,
>dogs and ponies. That's OK, as long as they don't insist we all use
>it. <snip silliness>
Nobody in the Word camp is insisting that _anyone_ use anything they
don't want to, we are simply responding in kind to the people who
posted staing that word was a useless hunk of junk and that some dinky
text editor was the bane of writings existence.
>
>That's the feelings I get from this discussion.
It's the feeling I'm _still_ getting.
>
> --berry
>
jmalone
jmalone
>>I was answering someone who seemed to be of the opinion that you
>>couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
>
>For some people (I'm one of them), that's true; Word puts them in a
>state of blank despair or homicidal fury or whichever, and their
>creative capacity is greatly reduced thereby.
Which is the biggest load of crap you've yet to put on paper (so to
speak). I cannot believe that you'd even consider thinking that, much
less actually coming out and saying it.
I could turn off _all_ of word's commands and use it as nothing more
than a blank sheet of paper, never stopping until I had run out of
things to say.
Are you actually saying that say (hypothetically) if Stephen King used
a text writer, he would produce _better_ work than in he used Word????
You _are_ a lunatic.
>--
>"But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty which produced
>it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in
>Faerie is more potent." -- "On Fairy-Stories", J.R.R. Tolkien
P.S. Tolkien bored me to tears; probably shocks you that _anyone_ who
writes s/f isn't properly in awe of J.R.R. Tolkien, doesn't it?
Now I'm an awful writer because I don't properly revere the legends of
the genre. This, of course, is what I would expect form you.
jmalone
David Joseph Greenbaum
(cyranos...@realityprime.com) inscribed in fleeting electrons:
: Word97 (from memory):
:
: shift+control + page-down (selects from here to end)
: control-c (to copy, or control-x to cut )
: alt-f, n, enter (new file, I think ctrl-n works too)
: ctrl-v (paste)
: ctrl-s, <filename>, enter (save it)
WP 5.1 : f12 ctrl-end ctrl-insrt shift-f3 enter f10 <foo.doc> enter
schluss.
Dave G.
--
Such fragrance -
from where,
which tree?
jmalone
>In article <35cd1bd4...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>>
>>I'm also neither a touch typist or a very fast one. But I get by. I'm
>>always telling myself that I'm going to learn how to touch type _any
>>day now_, but something else always comes up and I put if off until
>>_later_.
>
>Well, if you want to save time, that's one big way to do it. Makes it a
>lot easier to spend your time on the Net. On second thought, I'm not
>sure I really want to see more posts from you.
What's the matter, Aahz. Don't like people who disagree with your
stance? Or is this a personal dislike?
>--
> --- Aahz (@netcom.com)
jmalone
jessie shelton
> Italics is a question of available screen fonts, but isn't impossible.
> (Although why one wants on-screen italics is one of those things that
> baffles me a little.)
both bold and underline change the visual priority of the text for me,
and italics doesn't. So to my eyes it scans better, and doesn't
prioritize certain parts of the text, just marks them as different. I
denote italics in a text editor by bracketing with asterisks, but that..
just isn't the same.
> It's not a completely pure case, no, but there is a real conceptual
> ease issue; no one likes to use an editor or word processor that they
> don't find intuitive. There is a wide and legitimate range to
> 'intuitive', obviously enough. I just get somewhat peeved at having
> text-only tools regarded as primitive by some sort of a-prior nature.
oh, I agree. I never learned how to use vi, but I use emacs quite a
bit. Everything always ends up getting collated in word, though.
jessie
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
jessie shelton (one side of moebius)
shelton(AT)princeton.edu http://www.princeton.edu/~shelton
"Tick, clong, tick, clong, tick, clong, went the night."
- King Clode, _The White Deer_, Thurber
---------------------------------------------------------------
Aahz Maruch
Jeff Johnson <jsjo...@islandnet.com> wrote:
>pa...@webnexus.com wrote:
>>
>>Regular expressions are a fairly powerful method for specifying
>>search expressions.
>
>Word does support most of what you can do with regular expressions.
>I'm not sure what you can't do. Word just calls 'em 'wildcard
>searches'.
Can you replicate my previous regular expression, which replaces
"Willow" with "Rowan" if the previous word is capitalized and not at the
end of a sentence?
Aahz Maruch
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>On 09 Aug 1998 18:55:29 -0700, Berry Kercheval <be...@kerch.com>
>wrote:
>>
>
>That, my friend is a base libel, as we in the Word camp have been
>proving over and over again in our many posts. There are just as many
>function keys and _customisable_ function keys in Word as are in Vi,
>probably more.
<shrug> That's half-true, at best. The point is that vi does *not*
make use of function keys and arrow keys (the use of those keys is
strictly optional) -- it's all done with the standard keyboard plus the
control key. Moreover, as someone else pointed out, it's pretty damn
difficult to take a customized Word configuration between different
computers, not to mention different versions of Word.
Part of the reason vi seems to be a little touch-typist unfriendly is
because too many new keyboards put the control key in the wrong place.
Which is why I stick with my old AT-style keyboard.
Aahz Maruch
>In article <aahzExG...@netcom.com>,
> aa...@netcom.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
>> In article <ExEnp...@kithrup.com>,
>> Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >It's all in what you're used to. Has anybody mentioned the baby duck
>> >syndrome yet, where the first operating system you use, and the first
>> >editor you use, imprints on your nervous system and nothing else will
>> >ever seem as good?
>>
>> Bullshit.
>
>I think Dorothy was only offering this concept for discussion, not
>asserting it as it Trvth.
Yeah, I was getting a little overheated.
>> I'm one of the (relatively) few people entitled to have an opinion, in
>> Harlan's sense of the word.
>
>Can I ask what that means? I confess unfeigned ignorance.
Harlan Ellison: Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.
So far in this discussion, the only people claiming that Word is an
unalloyed virtue appear to have little experience with other paradigms
for generating and editing text.
Aahz Maruch
People who disagree with me are fine. People who don't know what
they're talking about are another matter.
Jonathan W Hendry
> I've done a fair bit of desktop publishing type stuff; _nothing_
> WYSIWIG is really WYSIWIG, they're all This Is As Close As The Screen
> Will Go; pixel width lines are a great way of finding this out,
> becuase where the screen shows them stopping and where they actually
> stop when printed won't necessarily match.
If you're using Postscript output, it might match better on a NeXTStep
system, since the screen is drawn in Postscript too.
--
Note: email to this address goes to /dev/null
To email a reply, write to jon at exnext dot com
Rachael M. Lininger
On Mon, 10 Aug 1998, Zeborah wrote:
>I don't recommend command-E to eject the disk - it'll eject it alright, but
>leave the icon behind and the next time you put another disk in the computer
>will eject it and ask for the original disk. (It's possible, though
>difficult, to get into infinite rounds of swapping disks, which can only be
>broken by rebooting the darn computer.)
Admittedly stupid interface there. Command-Y to put away (dismount)
disks; command-delete to put files/folders/etc in the trash. If you do
forget and use Command-E, you can throw out the image; if it wants the
disk back, hit command-period a bunch of times and it will go away.
When I'm extremely wealthy, I will get one of those systems that can
run both MacOS and some flavor of UNIX. Use the Mac stuff I know while
I learn the UNIX stuff I don't, and then just have the Mac partition
for things like photoshop and such.
FWIW, I started out on Windoze. I don't think I'll ever use it by
choice again, and if my workplace tries to make me I might start
looking for another workplace.
Rachael
--
My net access may go away for a bit, but I'll be back soon.
Rachael M. Lininger
lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu
Rachael M. Lininger
>In article <35cbe384...@news.usq.edu.au>, <jma...@quiknet.net> wrote:
>>
>>WHAT DID I MISS HERE???????
>
>You missed the editing capabilities. For text *entry* notepad is
>roughly the same as vi -- assuming you never make mistakes. But vi is
>much better than notepad as an editor. And, as someone else pointed
>out, the regex capabilities of vi blow Word out of the water.
As a Very Fast Touch Typist, I've been reading this with a lot of
interest. When I get a UNIX box, I think I'll have to try to learn
vi (I loathe mouses). Not, however, on my poorly administered shell
account at school....
>>From what I see, IMnotsoHO, of course, Word blows this liitle program
>>out of the water!
>
>Of course it does ... if you want a monster program tipping the scales
>at hundreds of megabytes that can format your text for a laser printer.
>But it's not much use for *writing*, IMAO.
If you want to format your bloody text for a laser printer, Quark
XPress is a) smalle in both kinds of memory, b) more stable, c)
faster, d) much, much better at it than Word. Make a template and
style sheet for Standard Manuscript Format; import text; fill in right
title name on the master page slug; and, if necessary, find/replace
italics with underline. Takes less than five minutes for short
stories. I assume Frame is equally useful for UNIX boxen, for those
who don't wish to do TeX or variations.
Granted, DTP programs have a steeper learning curve than Word. That's
because they plateau at a much higher and more useful level. Any word
processing program that crashes your file after 86 footnotes should be
removed from the market.
Rachael, who would like to learn Frame.
P.S. Anyone who tries to use a DTP program for word processing gets
fifty lashes with a wet noodle.
kens...@hotmail.com
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
> On 09 Aug 1998 18:55:29 -0700, Berry Kercheval <be...@kerch.com>
> wrote:
> >has a great many features that are not _necessary_ for writing,
>
> Depends on what _kind_ of writing you're talking about. I happen to
> find it immensley helpful while writing essays for school as well as
> for writing sf.....
You find *Word* helpful, is what you're saying--am I right? But you don't
find *every feature* of Word to be helpful in writing essays and/or in
writing SF--am I right again? I think that's what Berry was saying. Not
that Word is unhelpful, but that it contains many features that are--just as
was said--unnecessary for writing.
For example...I use Word to write essays, text, fiction, you name it. But,
in doing so, I have never used nor needed to use Word's drawing features, its
HTML features, its equation editor features, and so forth. It'd be a stretch
to say that these features are necessary for producing straight prose.
Don't jump all over that for things I'm not saying. I'm not saying this
makes Word bad. I'm not saying this makes Word inappropriate for writers.
Etc, etc. I'm just clarifying a simple point: Word has features not
necessary for writing. Let's just get that far. It's not a critique or
complaint; it's just a statement.
> What I asserted many, many posts ago was that _nowhere_ on the Word 97 box
> does it say : produced soley for writing fiction. It is a _word proccessor_,
Ask MS, and they'll emphasize that it's meant to be a hell of a lot more than
just a word processor. Many at MS would probably be offended or annoyed if
they thought you or I were thinking of it as just a word processor. It's a
desktop publisher, too. And an HTML editor. And a document manager. And
groupware. And so forth.
> marketed to provide many functions for many _different_ writing styles and
> tasks. Nobody can seem to get past this simple fact.
We all know it, already, but it's not germane to the discussion at hand.
Word wears many hats. We all see 'em. Look at 'em all--it must have a dozen
of those things, which is pretty impressive. We're not all agreed that it's
a good thing to have software that does so many things at once, though, and
we're not all agreed that that's the software we want for ourselves. We're
not agreed that any one of those hats is the best hat of its kind.
Some of us prefer other hats. If you've found a hat you like, good! We're
all happy for you, really, and wouldn't want you to switch hats.
> >especially writing fiction, where double-spaced courier-12 is the
> >standard for manuscripts. Further, Word is seen to be touch-typist
> >unfriendly.
>
> That, my friend is a base libel, as we in the Word camp have been
> proving over and over again in our many posts. There are just as many
> function keys and _customisable_ function keys in Word as are in Vi,
> probably more.
Let's not get hysterical. There are only so many keys on the keyboard, and
either software will pretty much allow you to do funky things with all of
them, and in combinations. No one has proven anything about the superior
functionality of either of them.
You could conceivably get Word to do almost anything by writing a macro,
possibly a very long and difficult macro. You can do much the same with Vi.
Some people prefer Vi because it's smaller and faster and more secure and runs
under more operating systems, etc, and some prefer Word because of the GUI and
so forth. Fine.
> >Professional fiction writers aren't, for the most part, interested in
> >desktop publishing.
>
> Niether are students who use it for essays, nor mothers who use it for
> letter-writing, nor executive who use it for memos, nor office
> assistants who use it for corporate text, drone on....
Mmm. So why not compartmentalize the software and let people buy, install,
and use only what they need? Yeah, I know, MS makes more money this way, and
that's just good business. But there *are* competing products, and this is
the kind of thing that will make some people prefer and use those other
products, and so here we are.
> >An editor that allows them to write, edit, move
> >paragraphs and so on, without moving from the home row, satisfies 95%
> >of their needs.
>
> It is a matter of personal taste and you know it.
Yeah, of course, so is most of everything. The statement was referring to a
previously defined type of user that has a specific set of needs, that's all.
> >They don't need or want real time spell checkers,
> >text flows <snip>
>
> Who are they? Do presume to speak for me or my writing group.
That wasn't about you or your writing group; it was about a specific type of
user, etc. I thought this was pretty clear in the original post.
> Nobody in the Word camp is insisting that _anyone_ use anything they
> don't want to, we are simply responding in kind to the people who
> posted staing that word was a useless hunk of junk and that some dinky
> text editor was the bane of writings existence.
I don't think you meant that quite the way you said it. Plus, I don't know
who, in this newsgroup, posted anything stating that Word was a useless hunk
of junk. I think people had pretty specific, and fairly well substantiated,
complaints that haven't been directly rebutted. And since you admit that
Word isn't perfect, where's the 'clash' here?
No one's saying Vi is perfect, either; they're just saying it's better for
them.
> >That's the feelings I get from this discussion.
>
> It's the feeling I'm _still_ getting.
Yes, but you seem to be drawing it from the ether and not from what anyone
else is actually saying. Take a breather. You're boxing shadows.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
And I'm spouting cliches (like "spouting cliches").
kens...@hotmail.com
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
> On 9 Aug 1998 17:08:32 -0400, gra...@gooroos.com (Graydon) wrote:
>
> >In article <35d1fe24...@news.demon.co.uk>,
> >Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >>Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
> >>on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
> >
> >Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>
> You mean like ctrl-x (cut), ctrl-v (paste), crtl-s (save) ctrl-z
> (undo), ctrl-y (redo), drone, drone, drone.....
Maybe he doesn't mean stuff like that. Since you don't know *what* the
editing capabilities of Vi are (I don't either), you don't know that they're
the same as the ones in Word. Maybe they are. Maybe they're stuff you and I
have never even dreamed of. Not impossible, you know.
My brother uses Vim to make Search-and-Replace alterations on multiple files
that he doesn't even have open without having to tell Vim where those files
are. He does that with a short (I won't say "simple") keyboard command. I'd
have a hard time duplicating that in Word--it wouldn't be worth the trouble.
I'd do it the long way.
>> For touch typists,
>
> May they be revered...hummmmmmh.
See this? You're generating hostility from the air. He wasn't making any
kind of a value judgement. He was making a specific comment about the
specific needs of a specific group of people, ie, some touch-typists. Since
you don't fall into that group, you haven't got any reason to be pleased or
offended. He didn't say that non-touch-typists were dirt. He didn't say
anything of the kind.
> > this very commonly messes with creative flow a great deal,
>
> As opposed to us non-touch typists who obviously don't _have_ any
> creative flow, hmm?
This is your suggestion. He didn't say a single thing to make that a
reasonable inference. I'm not being hostile here; I'm just pointing out a
fact.
>> by imposing a delay in the process of getting the thoughts into some kind of
>> tangible form.
>
> And for those of us that don't put everything down that way, you'll
> explain our method in which way?
He's saying that some touch-typists find the Vi system to be less disruptive
when they're writing. He's not saying anything about how anyone else does
anything. If you're not a touch-typist who uses Vi, how can you feel that his
statements are about you?
You seem to be reading this stuff through rant-colored glasses, and you're
going to annoy people if you're not careful. Honest advice. Take it down a
notch.
>> In which you can _flow_ just as easily in Word as in Vi with more
>> shortcut key functions
You're making unwarranted assumptions here. You admit you don't know what Vi
is like, but then you make concrete comparisons between Vi and Word. You're
free to do as you please, of course, but your logic doesn't have a good
foundation here, and you're more likely to--mixing my metaphors--put your
foot in your mouth.
> therby preserving that which we non-touch typists revere about you...... your
> _creative flow_.
Plus, it's uncommonly not nice to mock the creative flow of other writers,
don't you think? Especially a *group* of other writers, all based
on...hmm..what was the basis for this hostility again? A perceived slight
because you don't know how to touch type? That can't really be it, can it?
Let's clean this up or drop it, no?
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com
If you were certain that by having your lips removed you could end the
clubbing of baby harp seals, would you consider getting professional help?
Helen Kenyon
<gra...@gooroos.com> writes
>In article <35d02fb5...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Nonono, you still miss my point. Though that's wrong, ctl-whatever can
>>do whatever you want usually. As I've mentioned before I'm dyslexic
>
>The subset of commands available through the keyboard is just that; a
>subset of Word's commands. It's not the full range and it certainly
>doesn't include all of what vim will do. ('put from here to the end
>of the file in a new filed called _this_', all with keystroke
>commands, as an example.)
>
Actually, this can be done in Word 6.0 using only the keyboard. (I think
Shift+Ctrl+End, Ctrl+C, then Alt F N, Ctrl+V, Alt F S then type the file
name, then press Enter, then Alt F C will close that file to allow you
to continue working on the main document. And that's much easier to do
than to explain.)
>>I was answering someone who seemed to be of the opinion that you
>>couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
>
>For some people (I'm one of them), that's true; Word puts them in a
>state of blank despair or homicidal fury or whichever, and their
>creative capacity is greatly reduced thereby.
Then don't use it. Who's trying to force you to change? I still have a
fondness for the first WP I learned which was view on a BBC model B (32k
ram). The whole machine started up instantly. Bloop-bleep it went,
then it was ready to use. Type *view and pling, there's the word-
processor ready to start entering text. But that system isn't
compatible with what I use at work or with what editors may want.
(Assuming they want a copy on disc, which MZB's Fantasy magazine did.) I
don't have space in the house to keep several computers up and running,
so I'm happy to use whatever's convenient. I often do use Word for final
drafts, though I have to use the laser printer's built in Courier font
as the Courier New in Windows comes out thin and spidery.
Helen
--
Helen Kenyon, Gwynedd, Wales *** ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk
**PLEASE DELETE the extra bit from e-mail address if replying by mail**
Bruce Baugh
>So far in this discussion, the only people claiming that Word is an
>unalloyed virtue appear to have little experience with other paradigms
>for generating and editing text.
My experience with word processing in the last 12 months includes vi,
pico, Emacs, an X-Windows text editor whose name I forget, WordPerfect
5.1, 7, and 8, Lotus Word Pro 95 and 97, whatever the current version
of the Star Suite is, Notepad, Edit, Works 4.0 and 4.5, and Word 95
and 97.
I prefer Word. Not that it's ideal - in various cases other programs
do specific things I'm interested better - but it does more of the
things I do most often more easily than any other. Given the things I
really rely on done well, I can usually tweak Word to behave better
than its defaults on the rest.
--
http://pharospress.galstar.com/
Lace & Steel: swashbuckling and magic in a fantasy Renaissance
Nobilis: a new game of the secret struggle for the soul of the world
Check these out!
Bruce Baugh
><shrug> That's half-true, at best. The point is that vi does *not*
>make use of function keys and arrow keys (the use of those keys is
>strictly optional) -- it's all done with the standard keyboard plus the
>control key.
And for some of us that's actually a disadvantage. I've been
conducting informal experiments on myelf, and my accuracy seems to be
highest when I do have a certain amount of hand movement away from the
home rows. Right now I've got an ergonomic keyboard with a built-in
touchpad (Wave Keyboard, and I recommend it highly), and I make darned
few mistakes except when really tired or stressed. Which are good
times not to be typing a lot anyhow. :)
For routine composition my word rate is higher than with either
home-rows-only or keyboard-and-mouse approaches.
Graydon
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>On 9 Aug 1998 17:08:32 -0400, gra...@gooroos.com (Graydon) wrote:
>
>>Jon Poole <j...@apathy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>Hey, you misunderstand me, I meant why in the "Why can you not write
>>>on Word in the same way as you can on Vi) not in the why use Vi sense.
>>
>>Because Word doesn't have the editing commands hard to the keyboard;
>
>You mean like ctrl-x (cut), ctrl-v (paste), crtl-s (save) ctrl-z
>(undo), ctrl-y (redo), drone, drone, drone.....
Those are all _control_ keys. Especially when the control key is down
in the lower corners, this _requires_ you to move you hands off the
home row; they're special meta-characters, not standard typing
characters.
>>it's hard to mark, move, cut, or re-order text without resorting to
>>mice and menus.
>
>Except for those of us who know how.....
Can you save in Word without seeing the confirmation dialog? (Without
resorting to shareware programs to answer those automatically, I
mean.) Can you cut the next four paragraphs with five keypresses, all
normal typing keys?
>>For touch typists,
>
>May they be revered...hummmmmmh.
>
>> this very commonly messes with creative flow a great deal,
>
>As opposed to us non-touch typists who obviously don't _have_ any
>creative flow, hmm?
Whose creative flow obviously works differently or they would have
learned to touch type before their heads combusted.
>>by imposing a delay in the process of
>>getting the thoughts into some kind of tangible form.
>
>And for those of us that don't put everything down that way, you'll
>explain our method in which way?
I won't explain it at all, I don't know what method any of you are
using. I can talk about what I do and what some people I know well
do, and the common complaint with Word, et al. there is that it's
trying to force not only a particular document form but a particular
style of composition.
>....and that crtl-arrow will highligh a certain amount of text or that
>ctrl-] increases font point size....drone, drone, drone....
All control keys, you've noticed? Takes one's hands off the home row,
especially for the control-grey function key combinations.
Graydon
Jonathan W Hendry <jhe...@shrike.depaul.edu> wrote:
>Graydon <gra...@gooroos.com> wrote:
>> I've done a fair bit of desktop publishing type stuff; _nothing_
>> WYSIWIG is really WYSIWIG, they're all This Is As Close As The Screen
>> Will Go; pixel width lines are a great way of finding this out,
>> becuase where the screen shows them stopping and where they actually
>> stop when printed won't necessarily match.
>
>If you're using Postscript output, it might match better on a NeXTStep
>system, since the screen is drawn in Postscript too.
It's not the format; it's the dots-per-inch. The printer is going to
be at least six hundred these days; the screen is still stuck at an
order of magnitude less. No amount of cleverness can _always_ get
around that.
Graydon
Avi Bar-Zeev <cyranos...@realityprime.com> wrote:
>Graydon wrote in message <6qlm89$r...@excalibur.gooroos.com>...
>>The subset of commands available through the keyboard is just that; a
>>subset of Word's commands. It's not the full range and it certainly
>>doesn't include all of what vim will do. ('put from here to the end
>>of the file in a new filed called _this_', all with keystroke
>>commands, as an example.)
>
>
>
>shift+control + page-down (selects from here to end)
>control-c (to copy, or control-x to cut )
>alt-f, n, enter (new file, I think ctrl-n works too)
>ctrl-v (paste)
>ctrl-s, <filename>, enter (save it)
>
Against :.,$w new_file, though, it might not be considered _good_.
Especially if you have to wait for those menus to come up. The
commands that you can go to directly from the keyboard are still a
subset, keyboard commands to invoke menus or not.
>And, just to put my two shekels in, the only thing I hated about
>VI et al was that I'd frequently mistype one character in a long
>:command sequence and have to do the _whole_ thing over again.
>Doing sequences a step at a time in Word is much easier for me.
Any recent vi implementation will have two common features - up arrow
gives you back the last thing you typed, which you can then edit, and
<tab> gives you directory and file name expansion on the command line.
Saves typing.
Graydon
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
>On 9 Aug 1998 22:34:49 -0400, gra...@gooroos.com (Graydon) wrote:
>>>couldn't produce real writing, of any great quality, while using Word.
>>
>>For some people (I'm one of them), that's true; Word puts them in a
>>state of blank despair or homicidal fury or whichever, and their
>>creative capacity is greatly reduced thereby.
>
>speak). I cannot believe that you'd even consider thinking that, much
>less actually coming out and saying it.
It is not my custom to misrepresent my views.
>Are you actually saying that say (hypothetically) if Stephen King used
>a text writer, he would produce _better_ work than in he used Word????
I have no idea about Stephen King; I know that it is true for me that
I produce better work if the editor or word processor I'm using
doesn't try to compell a particular form of the text.
>P.S. Tolkien bored me to tears; probably shocks you that _anyone_ who
>writes s/f isn't properly in awe of J.R.R. Tolkien, doesn't it?
It doesn't surprise me at all.
There are, oddly enough, a diversity of opinions about what people who
write sf are, or ought to be, doing; this is why bookstores stock many
different books, in the hope of getting representatives of as many of
those opinions as possible to part with money.
kens...@hotmail.com
jmalone <d983...@helios.usq.edu.au> wrote:
I don't know who earlier posters were, here. Sorry; the attribs have
vanished.
> >>Whoa. Seems like an awful lot of trouble. Then again, I grew up with a
> >>mouse soldered to my right hand.
> >
> >Actually, taking one's hands off the keyboard is more trouble.
>
> Your _opinion_, not mine.
Well, the matter can be settled scientifically, depending on the definition of
"trouble" being used.
> >[Hitting the 'Esc' key does not count as taking one's hands off the
> >keyboard, nyah. --Ed.]
>
> Niether does crtl + (any key you wish to name) for shortcut keys, just
> like doing things in Vi; imagine that? And I _never_ have to take my
> hands from the keyboard.
Never? I don't suppose that you're saying that you actually, in normal use,
never use the mouse? Or that you're saying that everything you do with the
mouse is something you can duplicate by only using the keyboard? Not
approximate, mind you, but duplicate.
I'm not doing anything more, mind you, than seeking clarification of what you
said. It seems a very suspicious claim. I mean, I don't ever have to take
*my* hands off the keyboard, but there are things I can't do if I don't move
them elsewhere now and then.
> >I'm not sure why you're even bothering to evaluate vi.
>
> Because I've been watching everyone talk about what a wonderful
> program it is, so I'd thought I'd try it. Of course, I've already said
> this in _several_ previous posts which you would have known if you'd
> bothered paying attention.
I think a different point is being made. If you can't touch type and don't
understand how the software works, then your evaluation won't be that
balanced because your experienc with the software can't approach that of
those who use it the way it's, more or less, intended to be used. You
wouldn't want someone to test Word without being able to use the mouse, would
you?
It's rather like having someone who doesn't know how a manual transmission
works test an automobile that has one. They might say, "Well, it's a tad
slow and jerky, and it stalled whenever I tried to stop." But that wouldn't
be a fair evaluation, now would it? If you don't know how to "drive" Vi, you
can't expect to evaluate it except insofar as it meets your needs. And if
you can't drive it, it will obviously not meet your needs.
But that's not exactly the fault of the software. It's not meant for people
who don't drive with a manual transmission. If you see what I mean.
> > Just so you can say "it sucks."
>
> (Sigh) Look, before you blather off like an idiot, perhaps you could
> go back and review those posts, hmm?
No, I think good points were being made here by whoever was saying that.
> In other words. Don't waste my time.
I think you're wasting your own time. No, really. I really don't think
you're going to figure out why some people do better with Vi, for starters,
and I don't think you're going to understand what other people have been
trying to say in this thread. I'm not patronizing you; it's just that people
will say "x" and only "x," and you'll berate them for saying "y." It doesn't
make much sense.
I think you've been in too many arguments over the MS thing before, and it's
poisoned your mind. Forgive the dramatics (or don't), but take a walk and
re-read what other people are saying, please.
John Kensmark
kens...@hotmail.com