[SunRescue] Should an editor require you to think?

[Chris Byrne]

Ok, theres a pretty fundamental issue involved in the pico vs. vi vs. EMACS
debate.

Should a tool require you to undertand it's use, or should that use be inherently
obvious.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both postions.

Obviously you should understand a chainsaw before you attempt to use it.
Read the manual. But should you have to read a manual to use a pencil?

To my mind beginning tools should be intuitive. In fact I think that beginning
tools should require no documentation whatsoever.

When it comes to writing, the culture in the united states has nearly totally
absorbed the concept of typing on a screen as a "natural" thing. Most people
in our culture feel comfortable with natural stream of consciousness writing
in a word processor.

pico has the advantage of "feeling" similar to that which most beginning
users understand. As someone earlier noted, pico is the notepad of the UNIX
world, and just about everyone can figure out notepad in seconds without
any help.

Of course pico absolutely sucks for doing anything other than basic word
processing, and simple config file editing.

It is horrid for coding because it doesn't preserve spacing properly for
long files. It cant display literals of 8+ bit characters, it cant display
"hidden" characters. It has no extensive pattern matching and replacing,
no string globbing, etc... etc... etc...

But these are all things that coders, power users, and administrators need
to do. Most of the people on this list are at least one of those things.
How much of these things do generic users need to do?

vi is extremely non intuitive. If I simply type vi at the command prompt
I recieve a screen full of tildes. There is no chance in hell I can use
this without looking at help files or man pages.

But, there are things I can do with vi, that are literally impossible with
a simpler editor, especially with a vi variant like vim or elvis etc...
And as several people have pointed out, if I am a touch typist I can navigate
and access all my functions without shifting my hands from the basic positions.
These are all Good Things <insert TM symbol here>

But they are not obvious things. Most people who use vi never use anything
but the most basic functions, because they are non-transparent.

Many people like this. It gives them a feeling of superiority, of greater
intelligence because they can use the avanced tool, but other, simpler people
cant.

So the questions remains, should an editor require you to think about it
rather than about what you are editing. Should the tool be an integral part
of the process, or should it be trnaparent, irrelevant to the process.

Chris Byrne