dndobrin@athena.MIT.EDU (09/10/86)
1. "UNIX is expensive." For 25 users, a UNIX system costs around $2000
per terminal. (See recent Computerworld FOCUS.) True, a PC can be
bought for 1K, but when you start adding Microsoft Word and a 3Com
board and a hard disk, it's actually significantly more expensive.
2. The more powerful something is, the more difficult it is to learn,
but, if it's learned well, the more efficiency it produces in the long
run. Preferring easy-to-learn but gutless programs is usually
short-sighted. This is true of techies and non-techies.
3. Personally, I prefer Emacs, but I don't want to start up an old
fight. The real trouble with vi, troff, or Emacs is that they
are unnecessarily hard to learn. Good training or a decent
quick reference card can reduce the learning time to manageable
proportions.
4. I don't want to get into WYSIWIG vs. command-driven, but it is clear
that if people are taught command-driven formatting--by people, by
the way, I mean secretaries, not techies--they like it. I am a
consultant, and I go into many offices, and in some, all the
secretaries use UNIX, vi, and troff. At Addison-Wesley, all the
salespeople format their letters with TeX. Obviously, this
requires some forethought; you can't have everybody in the office
reinventing formats all the time. But if you prepare some standard
ones, command-driven formatting works reasonably well.
5. The basic advantage of vi (or Emacs) and troff besides power has not
been mentioned. It is that you're dealing with ASCII files. In
a networked environment where archives must be kept, this is
significant. No mucking around trying to strip off the Control-L's.Cherry.XSIS@Xerox.COM (09/12/86)
Vi, et.al., are not that user friendly by themselves however, their programatic interfaces are such that, given the right terminal, and a top layer to these editors, they can be made pretty easy to use and learn. Sure the programmer or admin must write the "user layer" but when you have options such as EXINIT as variables which may be set when invoking the editor, it isn't that bad. A non-computer type person may then, for example, type to the terminal 'blank memo' and the layer program uses various controls to start vi, setup function keys on the terminal, read a pre-made memo form and let the user start editing. When the person quits the editor, then the "layer program" comes up and asks the user what they want to do with the file (mine is menu driven) and that's about it. My whole layer program is just a script file so that it is easy to change for different users. Using predefined variables, redirection, and functions can greatly improve the user interface for ex, vi, troff, nroff, etc. I agree however that in their raw state thay would be too confusing for the office type user. The programming environment of Unix is a great starting point but I'd never use it as the "final" product. B.C. & Zot
guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (09/12/86)
> 4. I don't want to get into WYSIWIG vs. command-driven, but it is clear > that if people are taught command-driven formatting--by people, by > the way, I mean secretaries, not techies--they like it. Well, there are opinions on both sides of this fence. I'm a techie, and I wish to h*ll I never had to work with *roff again; I wish I had a reasonable WYSIWYG system. I suspect I could do a lot of the stuff I now do with *roff with Interleaf; unfortunately, my workstation isn't licensed for it. When Rusty Sandberg did one of the NFS papers, he closed it with thanks to Interleaf for making it possible to do the document without using "troff"! I suspect for typical business use, any extra power (or, at least, power per buck) you get out of some non-formatting text editor + *roff would largely be wasted. You might look at getting some WYSIWYG program for UNIX, if you decide to go with UNIX. BTW, there are WYSIWYG editors that can keep their files as straight ASCII as well; Interleaf, for one. (Note: Interleaf is expensive and requires a big-mapped display, and is more powerful than you'd need for business word processing.) -- Guy Harris {ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy guy@sun.com (or guy@sun.arpa)