[SunRescue] Should an editor require you to think?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On 7 Mar 2001, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> On 06 Mar 2001 22:15:02 -0800, Chris Byrne wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> None of Vi, Pico, or Emacs are Word Processors the way that term is
> generally used.  They are, in the case of the first two, strictly text
> editors.  The Emacs Operating Environment is not just a text editor, but
> it doesn't have a worthwhile word processor (amateur desktop publishing
> is more acurate).  For editing config files, any of these editors is
> just fine, but for writing things like a resume, or a report for school,
> they're really not the right tool for the job.

I agree that Pico isn't suited towards wordprocessing.  I'd say the same
about vi, but that would anger people needless.  But emacs is great word
processing.  It sports tight integration with aspell (or ispell, take your
choice), style, diction, and things like latex.  I've used emacs for quite
a number of school reports with graphs and tables and letters.  The key is
to keep in mind that just doing wordprocessing doesn't require full blown
DTP features like Word offers.  In most cases, such features are a
hinderence.  For my resume, I used emacs (for the HTML version), a program
called DiscResume (it's awefull, but a job database used it), and
Microsoft Publisher (a real DTP program).  I've never taken the time to
learn latex well enough to do things like resume's in it, but then, latex
was made for documents (the longer the better), not design work.  

And where I come from, there are other people who use VI combined with the
above mentioned accessories for word processing.


--
Joshua Boyd