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.