From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Little People Article-I.D.: ucb.1248 Posted: Thu Jun 3 00:50:55 1982 Received: Thu Jun 3 05:45:36 1982 >From LAWS@SRI-AI Thu Jun 3 00:26:50 1982 This list has addressed the requirements of several user communities: technical people who need sophisticated editor systems; professional writers who need convenient ones; and secretaries who (supposedly) need easily-learned ones. I would like to know if anyone has looked into the needs of young children. My two-year-old is just starting to type a few words and numbers. For the most part I just get him into insert mode and let him bang away -- the line just keeps wrapping down the page. For special effects he knows the caps lock and the VI undo command ("magic-u"). Soon he will have mastered character delete and line delete. Even these simple commands do not serve his needs well. The VI character delete merely backspaces over text, not blanking it until you overwrite or hit escape. This is confusing. I have to enter insert mode because the VI top-level command has too many "magic" keys for him to comprehend. EMACS is better in this respect, but the cursor motion keys would be far beyond him. (Both editors also suffer from "magic cursor motion" due to tracking the ends of lines.) It seems to me that a top-level picture mode (either insert or replace) would be best. A command buffer or command echo (as in ZED) would also seem a good thing since it would continually remind him when he is using control commands (however invoked) that he is indeed in a command mode. A motivated child can no doubt learn any given system much better than I can. In general, however, I maintain that children and non-programming spouses require much slicker systems than we hackers do. LOGO, SMALLTALK, and PLATO systems have had to deal with this situation; can anyone enlighten me as to the editor characteristics they have used? -- Kenneth Laws -------