editors (was Re: DOS 1.0)

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Tue Jan 14 18:01:01 2003

Philip wrote:
> After all these year, I don't think I could be as productive with
> another editor. It's not that joe is a stunning editor (it lacks some
> features that I loved in quickedit/tse32), but I don't want to "waste"
> time learning to do something (edit code) that I can already do very
> well.

I'm certainly not going to tell you that you're wrong. If it works for
you, and you're happy with it, there's no reason to change.

I went through a similar progression, with Wordstar (starting in 1978,
if memory serves), then the Borland IDEs, and a few other programs that
used the Wordstar key bindings.

Around 1984 I was thrust into an environment where the only choices for
a screen editor were vi and jove. I quickly determined that vi was an
abomination, and learned jove. Jove is a simple editor using the basic
emacs key bindings. Jove wasn't particularly powerful, but "real" emacs
was too slow on the VAX-11/750. Since then I've used Gosling Emacs, then
GNU Emacs, with detours into MicroEmacs on MS-DOS. At this point I
wouldn't dream of using anything but GNU Emacs, though I do keep a copy
of Jove around for emergencies. I'm amazed that I was ever satisfied
with Wordstar.
Received on Tue Jan 14 2003 - 18:01:01 GMT