Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 07:02:27 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> Cc: gmarco@masternet.it (Gianmarco Giovannelli), current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <666.832860147@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 23 May 1996 14:17:55 BST." <199605231317.OAA24711@cadair.elsevier.co.uk>
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> I'm curious, what exactly is a newbie in this context, what sort of > user group are we trying to win over? It's not a question of "winning over" anyone or waging any significant new campaigns - yeesh! Has this whole editor thing ever gotten blown out of proportion! All I've ever wanted with this was one very very simple thing: An editor that displays its keybindings on the screen. The set of people who've never seen vi before includes everyone from the unix newcomers to hardened computing professionals who've spent their entire careers using VM/CMS or VMS machines and define the word "editor" completely differently. For those people, I don't want to make a trip to Egghead for a vi book a necessary step in setting up FreeBSD on the new Gateway machine some lazy sunday afternoon. There are already enough complexities in trying to bring a new user up from a standing start (and yes, this SHOULD be possible - we're just not there yet) without adding a cryptic, multi-mode editor to the equation. For the record, I also bear _NO_ personal animosity to vi. I know vi very well indeed, I've used it for decades, I still use it about 50/50 with emacs (my fingers are simply wired for vi and I often use it in reflex even with an emacs window lying around nearby :-). This is not about the vi users, this is about how to do effective bootstrapping into UNIX and an entirely different topic. As to the root defaults, that's not a problem - I'll simply add an editor choice menu to sysinstall (where setting the editor has already been possible for awhile in the Options screen) and tack it on the configuration question path. Whichever editor is chosen will also be written into the root profile files at the time that /etc/sysconfig is updated. Problem solved? Jordan
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