Xref: utzoo comp.editors:247 comp.mail.misc:1108
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ncr-sd!matt
From: matt@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Matt Costello)
Newsgroups: comp.editors,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Editor for mail
Keywords: mail editors emacs mush
Message-ID: <2369@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 16 Jul 88 03:05:32 GMT
References: <215@fed.FRB.GOV>
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 41
Followup-To:

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In article <215@fed.FRB.GOV> m1rcd00@fed.FRB.GOV (Bob Drzyzgula) writes:
>	So I invite discussion on this. Does anyone know of a deathly
>simple, entirely intuitive, full screen editor that will work on
>vt220 terminals, and maybe do function keys and stuff, that might
>satisfy these users? Has anyone done what I described with emacs?

To tell you where I am coming from:   I was a member of a team that built
a menu driven evironment for new/naive/other users, the main feature
was a bloody simple interface to email.  It is considered a big success
and is in use worldwide by several thousand people.  It is partly
proprietary to NCR so it cannot be distributed.

DO NOT WRITE YOUR OWN EDITOR!  No matter what you do, or how well
you do it, somebody (probably your bosses boss) is going to hate it.
Our normal editor for sending mail is called compose and is so simple
to use that I absolutely hate it.  Somebody with an ergonomic background
decided that all commands must be followed by a newline.  This is fine
for a hunt-and-pecker but it quickly becomes tedious.  You also have the
problem of PC people only learning this toy editor and then becoming angry
when it cannot be used to edit a 2000 line message with lines over 80 columns
wide.

Force them to use a real editor.  One of the things I like about MUSH
(as a User Agent) is that the built-in editor, if it can be called that,
is almost idential to that used by Mail/mailx.  It should be enough for
those who cannot be bothered to learn an editor.  Mostly it is even enough
for me.

If you are willing to customize it emacs should be a good choice for a
real editor.  I don't use it as I find vi universally available and I
dislike customizable editors; I don't even like key bindings in vi.
But customizing emacs can provide a function key driven editor that
even your manager will love; if they don't then you can just hand them
a copy of the emacs documentation.
-- 
Matt Costello	
+1 619 485 2926	
		{ucsd,att,pyramid,nosc.mil}!ncr-sd!matt