From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: where's the end of the line? Article-I.D.: ucb.1333 Posted: Sat Jun 12 00:26:41 1982 Received: Sun Jun 13 02:21:10 1982 Reply-To: ople >From KLOTZ@MIT-OZ Sat Jun 12 00:24:11 1982 They also generally have a special character on the screen that represents the newline at the end of each line (it often seems to be a down-pointing triangular shape). I have used editors/word processors that have this feature, and find it distracting. I also foget that there isn't a real CR at the end of each line, but that's probably my fault for using such an editor for a more general purpose than that for which it was designed. Wang's standalone system has this character, and also has a faint point instead of a space. Most such systems don't allow lines longer than the screen width, and gloss over that by always being in autofill mode. The claim is that for those who use it, it doesn't matter, since all they do is write documents anyway. These systems universally (as nearly as I can tell) require the user to go into ``insert mode'' to put text in to the middle of a paragraph. Probably the people who use them don't mind, since they are mostly typing letters that other people wrote, and then they do need to change something, it is minor. I believe that most people (not in the academic community) who prefer editors that are always in write-over mode don't do composition using the editor. It's too easy to accidently overwrite text when you want to insert it, and it's hard to try putting together different phrases and sentences when you have to enter and exit different modes to do it. I disagree to some extent with the statement that these people are doing something right. I think that the editors they are writing are for completely different types of users, who use editors as if they were IBM correcting typewriters. The wp programs are supposed to fit into that model. In the community of academic users, who want a general purpose editor for both natural languages and progamming languages, the model of a typewritten sheet of paper is unnecessarily restrictive, and not worth emulating. Leigh.