creat 1186
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Got it. Thanks.
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Well, my point was that I didn't understand what you meant by "think in characters", nothing about whether it was a good idea. I'm happy to agree that too much distance between the user's mental model and what the computer is actually doing is not a good thing.
snip I was thinking of editing text in general rather than just code, so "copyediting" means correcting...
Anyway Rich's description of character-oriented versus line-oriented I think made it clear to me.
Okay. And you never had someone paging through a file doing, oh, copyediting or something .... Well, maybe not. Fair enough.
It's just barely possible that it was something non-Unix running on a VAX, but it was butturedly not anything from Microsoft. For one thing, I was remotely logged in from a text terminal. Did any MS OS support that in 1989? (Or ever?)
It's also possible that I didn't try ^C. I can't imagine why not, but it's possible .... Also it's possible that this particular TECO was trapping ^C's, I guess.
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The problem I had was that I started thinking about the video TECOs that drew everything in core. In these cases, the N and S search were almost functionally identical. Oh, good. :-) Now I...
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Agreed. I probably didn't mention that ctrl-h brings up online help -- probably the single most annoying thing to me about emacs.
"Monitor mode versus ...." Oh, what UNIX people would maybe say as "talking to the shell versus talking to the editor". Yeah.
Which is nice, but emacs runs on multiple o-s platforms, so perhaps it's not unreasonable that it's not consistent with all of their monitors-shells-whatever.
Which of course emacs isn't anyway.
Rich's post clarified things for me. It sounds like you have another clbutt of editors -- "character editors" maybe? -- that I wasn't thinking about.
No argument here about the benefits of consistency. I still wonder, though, whether maybe these not-so-technical users were smarter than the current crop or what.
My experience with emacs (limited, but not zero) suggests otherwise. YMMV, maybe.
Yipes. What's all that "SOSO...."?
No argument that the ability to use one's editor of choice well is a valuable skill. There's a reason I try hard to stick to tools that let me edit text in vi(m) .... :-)
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.