Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 22:27:09 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> Cc: Andreas Klemm <andreas@knobel.gun.de>, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de, freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: /stand/ee Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960520210951.1831A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199605201639.RAA11154@cadair.elsevier.co.uk>
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On Mon, 20 May 1996, Paul Richards wrote: > Well, what I was really getting at is that Unix is not trivial to administer > and having the default editor be vi gets you off on the right foot :-) Bah. Normally you say pretty sensible things, but... ;-) There are some aspacts of unix that genuinely make it more difficult to administer than your average dos box, but there is also the cumulative effect of many smaller unnecessary complications, and vi contributes more than its fair share to the difficulty. I fail to see how adding random roadblocks and potholes in any way a service to the new user. Vi is "standard" in much the same way that MS-DOS is "standard": not because it is good (which is a *separate* issue), but because people have a great investment in it. For programming, vi has its place, but for a lot of sysadmin task, and those involved in getting a new system up and running in particular, the power of vi is excessive, and the learning curve that goes with it is consequently not justified. I have yet to meet file in /etc that where vi or emacs has proven to be discernably more capable or efficient than pico. On this "standard" editor front, I think the other popular operating systems (msdos, windows, os2, macos) have all hit the nail squarely on the head. Each includes an editor that is very small, trivial to learn, and trivial to use. These editors (edit, notepad, e, simpletext) are present on every system and can effectively handle the editing tasks required to customize the system. At the same time, they have no pretentions of being the "one true editor". For serious editing, be it prose or code, the user will choose another editor most suitable to their particular task. Some will find nirvana in a single editor and user it for everything, which is is just fine. Others will find a few more specialized editors more suitable. Every time this editor war comes up, I see a bazillion posts from diehard vi users that conflate the concept of a "standard" editor with the concept of the "one true editor". The two concepts are mutually exclusive. I'm not one to bring change for the sake of change, and at this point I wouldn't dream of proposing to remove vi from the core distribution. However, it is equally shortsighted to keep tradition for sake of tradition. Vi has stubbornly ignored all that the last 15 or so years of human computer interaction research has discovered, and the population of users who have no desire to invest the time to learn a cranky old editor is only going to rise. The longer the unix community clutches with cold bony fingers to the "one true editor" tradition, the smaller the user base will become. > at and I don't see that market going away anytime soon. The only possible > threat is NT rather than windows. Trying to win over every desktop user out NT and unix are probably on par when it comes to inherently difficult administration concepts, but unix throws other random and unnecessary hurdles in the users path. Things like vi. > users. I'm serious about the documentation issue. New users will not > find any documentation on ee out there, all those beginner books talk > about vi (and possibly emacs) so those who really have switched to unix > and want to learn how to use it will have another hurdle to jump over > before they can even start. I'm serious about documentation too. Vi is lousy as a "standard" editor precicely because it needs documentation. When was the last time you had to dig through a book to figure out how to save a file in Notpad or simpletext? Vi is the hurdle that *many* have tripped over, ee is a step and pico a mere bump. Okay. I'm done with my rant. I return you to your hacking... ;-) -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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