Re: [TUHS] screen editors

[Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org>]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Dan Cross wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:39 AM Nemo Nusquam <cym224@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> In earlier days, my wife was given email by telnetting to an SGI
>>> system and using elm.  One day, I visited her office as she was
>>> composing a message.  Intrigued, I asked her what the editor
>>> was. She did not know and pointed to her cheat-sheet listing editor
>>> commands.  One was ^X^C to exit-and-send.  She is not a programmer
>>> and I was a bit surprised at their choice.
>>
>>
>> Hmm, I'm actually kind of not. Starting users off with a modal
>> editor (that starts in command mode, no less!) can be surprising for
>> novices; with emacs, at least you can start typing text and, well,
>> see text.
>
> This is one of the reasons I liked E when I first used it: it was
> modal, but it started in edit mode.  (Also you KNEW what mode you were
> in, which I understand isn't always the case with vi, although it
> usually is in the clones iirc?)
>
>> I think that one of the smartest things Marc Crispin ever did was
>> write `pico` to go with `pine`. A simple editor targeted at the
>> novice was really useful for casual and/or new users, particularly as
>> the Internet spread and an account on a Unix system was the default
>> introduction to email etc for so many.
>
> And I still use nano - which is a rewrite of pico.

The 'gnu' version (or maybe just gnu licensed) of pico, cuz there has to
be a 'gnu' licensed of everything :-/

> pico Just Works(R)(TM)(C), and it's not enormous.  nano adds a few things I 
> like, but the UI is the same.  Heck...I still use PINE and am sending this 
> message from it ;)

I used pine for years, now alpine, fingers are as hard wired for moving
around in it as they are for doing things in vi(m).  However, I also
have (al)pine use vi for the message editing. :)

I learned ed a long time ago because I once had some box that would boot
into single-user mode, but not far enough to get any termcap/info stuff
loaded, vi didn't work, ex didn't work, but ed did.  Not too long ago, I
used ed to fix a hosed up passwd file via salt... did something like:

sudo salt some-box cmd.run 'printf "1\n/mparson\ns/foo/bar/\nw\nq\n" | ed /etc/passwd'

I don't remember what exactly was wrong, but it prevented someone from
being able to log in and it wasn't fixable with the 'users' state.
Maybe it was a bad path to root's shell and we couldn't log in on the
console or something.  I've slept since then, lost the details.

The guy watching over my shoulder didn't even know what 'ed' was.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ