From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: The Recent Roast Article-I.D.: ucb.1206 Posted: Fri May 28 02:18:16 1982 Received: Sat May 29 03:05:27 1982 >From RWK@SCRC-TENEX@MIT-AI Fri May 28 00:56:34 1982 I don't think you need to defend Z much. I think all the roasting was due to Steve Wood's outrageous claims that the so-called 1-D model of editing was "obsolete". I admit to having borrowed that word in some replies with satirical intent, and that was probably gratuitously inflamatory. I saw Z today for the first time, and was impressed by many things about it. I still wouldn't want to use it for editing text, but I sure would prefer it (assuming I knew the command set, etc.) for editing tables, pictures, etc. And in terms of making use of things on the screen in commands, such as searches and file-loading, it was superior in several instances to ZMACS, the EMACS decendant editor on the Lisp Machine. This led to users new to the Lisp Machine to expect a number of features which we have only recently begun to address in earnest. That Yale has been isolated was obvious, yet that hasn't stopped them from coming up with a different set of clever ideas. Unfortunately, I ran out of time so I did not get to talk to Steve Wood, as I had hoped. Sorry to have missed you, Steve; some other time, perhaps. I have espoused the idea from time to time that no single model is adaquate for a text editor, that you may want to deal with various abstractions in your text editor. In comparing how one Z user did things vs. how I do the same things, the Z user would use a high-speed repeating key to do X and Y movements, where I would typically use various commands which were based on what I was editing. The Z mode of use is clearly much easier to learn than my mode of use. It does not follow from this, however, that Z is significantly easier to learn; begining ZMACS users typically make much heavier use of the mouse as a pointing device and never learn the keyboard techniques that I have developed since the days of TECMAC (an EMACS predecessor). Since my intent was to help with ZMACS rather than explore Z, I can't make any real comparison as to the wealth of features provided, but I wasn't shown any commands which understand program indentation and things like that. In fact, I wasn't shown anything like word-commands. My favorite EMACS command is Meta-Rubout, which kills the word before the cursor. Just the thing for badly misspelled words! Does Z have these things? Do people use them? Or do Z users just make use of the fast repeat keys? There is something to be said for a single, uniform, simple model, in that it produces something which can be learned in a very short time. If your initial learning effort is a major part of the total effort, as in something that will only be used casually, then that can be an overriding factor over total functionality. There is a subset of the EMACS command set which is like this, which I show to casual new EMACS users. I suspect I was being show a combination of those features and some flashier ones meant to challange ZMACS. If there is a Z document I would be very interested in seeing it. In reply to your (Mishkin) message, I stand by my claim that and editor which only truncates lines is completely unacceptable to me. And I would extend that "to me" to anybody manipulating text (as opposed to pictures) which was editing on a screen wider than the one they are currently using. I readily acknowledge that wrapping isn't acceptable if your intent is to edit a picture, table, etc. That EMACS doesn't provide me with this does not concern me too much because I don't do these things very often, although don't overlook how much the capabilities of your editor may shape what you consider doing (like if picture-making is easy, you may make more pictures!). I only brought out the number of EMACS users to underscore that it is not reasonable to expect the EMACS user community to accept throwing EMACS away wholesale for the sake of a monitor hack. I think it's rather bizzarre that this discussion started as a suggestion for how to improve EMACS response by throwing away the EMACS command set as being "too hard to do efficiently" or whatever. Please don't try to paper over the fact that Steve *DID* attack EMACS. I think the resulting barrage was completely justified. Unlike a lot of high-intensity flaming, however, I think this has been a very educational exchange on all sides.