barber@ittvax.UUCP (Brad Barber) (09/21/84)
Well the responses are in along with promotional literature from most
vendors. My reading is that the best established editor is Rand's e
and the best new editor is Syntactic's CrystalWriter.
The Rand e editor has a long history. It's in the public domain ($250
for a distribution tape from Rand) and available for Unix 4.2bsd.
Interactive Systems has supported versions called ined and Ten Plus.
Ten Plus is a major enhancement that provides a clean front end to
Unix. The original e author, Ned Irons, was the developer. It isn't
available yet for Unix 4.2, but you should look at it anyway.
Syntactic's CrystalWriter is a brand new product that combines ease of
use with ease of learning. It has standard document formats, an object
directory, no modes, and a softkey command structure. It is not
available yet for Unix 4.2.
I received messages promoting Rand's e editor, Syntactic's CrystalWriter,
and emacs. They follow below:
==================================================================
1. e/rand/ined
==================================================================
From decvax!randvax!guyton Sat Aug 18 03:31:53 1984
Hi,
Rand has done a distribution of our editor for several
years. It is a multi-window screen editor that most
people around here prefer to Emacs (nobody here uses Vi).
The basic choice seems to be ease of use (Rand Editor) .vs.
power of commands (Emacs).
We charge a $250 handling fee to do a distribution, but once
you have it you can give it to all your friends [we've finally
done away with our non-disclosure agreement].
Send mail to decvax!randvax!distribu for ordering info, or
call us at (213)393-0411 and ask the Rand operator for the
"E & MH Distribution person".
-- Jim
p.s. our mail software (MH) is included in the distribution.
____________________________________________________________________
From decvax!ucbvax!lcc.barry@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA Thu Aug 23 10:26:28 1984
If your terminals have a reasonable number of function keys that transmit
special sequences, I recommend the Rand editor, variously known as ned,
e10, e11, e14, e15, e17, and INed (the latter is Interactive Systems' version).
e14 will fit on a PDP-11 with separate I&D space; I recommend e17 for machines
with large address spaces, especially those like vaxen that run vmunix.
ned and its descendants are simple screen editors, without structure oriented
commands such as provided by emacs (in certain modes) and vi. On the other
hand, secretaries can learn to use it in a few hours, and it has a cut and
paste facility missing in most other editors: you can insert, delete, and
replace rectangular areas. It also has multiple windows in case you want
to see two or more files at once. (Or two parts of the same file). You
can also recover any line(s) you've modified/deleted during the session.
It's available from Rand Corp. for a copying fee and is in the public domain.
It took me a few days to bring it up on our vax and slightly longer to
get it going on my home computer.
Btw, emacs is an amazingly big win if you're working from home over a slow
link. It also has the advantage (from a networker's viewpoint) that a very
similar editor is available on a wide variety of systems. (ITS/10X/TOPS20,
unix, VMS, Multics plus a variety of micros.)
barry gold
____________________________________________________________________
From decvax!vax135!miles Tue Aug 28 12:18:47 1984
I use the RAND editor "ned" (also known as "e", and "e17") which was
made for Berkeley UNIX, and was recently updated to 4.2bsd. In my
opinion, it's light years ahead of vi. It allows for multiple windows
on different files (with pick and put between windows, etc.) and
operations on rectangular areas of text. If you are composing a table
of numerical data, for instance, you can create one column and then
duplicate that column to the left or right of itself (or elsewhere) to
check for proper formatting. I have seen no other editor do this.
The user can execute a shell command from inside the editor and have
its output inserted at the current place in the file being edited.
Error recovery is excellent.
Bugs: No "undo" command. Does not let you open a file for reading in
a directory that is not owned by the user (even if the user is root!)
since it leaves droppings behind in files that look like: .es1, .ek1.
Cannot have more than one "ned" running in the same directory since
both copies will try to write to .ek1 (a standard name ned uses to
journal the keyboard entries). No "delete_word" command.
Overall performance: The best I have seen on any system. Handles
very large files gracefully, and is very user friendly and natural
to use.
The copyright on the latest version (called "e17") for
4.2bsd has been abandoned, so the source code is now public
domain. I have a copy of the source and could probably be persuaded
to send you a copy, but a more reliable source would be from RAND
Corp.:
Rand Corp.
1700 Main St.
Santa Monica, CA
90406
(213) 393-0411 ask for X427 (Computer Services) and
say that you would like a copy of the RAND editor e17 (RAND people
refer to it as the RAND editor). The extension might be out of date,
as I haven't used it for 2 years.
- Miles Murdocca
AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
(201) 949-2504
ittvax!decvax!decwrl!amd!dual!zehntel!ihnp4!vax135!miles
==================================================================
2. CrystalWriter
==================================================================
From decvax!decwrl!dual!ptsfa!rpf Sat Aug 18 20:05:25 1984
Try CrystalWriter by Syntactics, were pretty impressed so far.
See the review in Volume 1, Number 3 issue of Unix/World.
Roy Falk ......ucbvax!dual!ptsfa!rpf
_______________________________________________________________
From decvax!decwrl!dual!qantel!pthya!jmg Sun Aug 19 21:02:08 1984
Dear Brad,
I'm responsible for bringing 3rd party software onto
systems we are distributing with our own applications. I have
used Horizon previously, and would only wish it on my worst
enemy. There are three other packages I've found, and of them
the best one is Crystal Writer.
XED - Computer Methods Limited
22222 Sherman Way
Canoga Park, Ca
(818) 884 2000
A BIG system that attempts to do it all. Word-process,
data-base, form-building, etc. Managed to talk themselves
out of selling us (Pacific Bell) 60 copies by giving me a
run-around instead of support. If you like playing with
termcaps, they invented a brand-new one to learn.
Three levels of help, with varying degrees of menus,
but I haven't had the patience to do anything except
stay in the middle level.
One major problem, our systems are based on the CT
Megaframe, and thus have non-standard spooling. XED
wants to define its own spoolers, or use yours, and
that wasn't p[ossible to do easily. It became old
quickly.
Lyrix - Santa Cruz Operation
500 Chestnut St.
Santa Cruz, Ca. 95061
(408) 425 7222
Word-star-like is the best way to describe this one.
Same preponderance of control-keys, long help screens
etc.
A lot easier to install than XED, amnd I have some
beginning users up and going on it (in 2 days). It
interfaces nicely with nroff, and depends on nf\roff
to do its formatting, which I don't like (nroff and
new users don't mix too well).
Crystal Writer - Syntactics Corporation
3333 Bowers Ave. Suite 145
Santa Clara, Ca 95051
408-727-6400
I point you to the review in UNIX World, he says
it better than I. A dream to install, the first
(and only) wp to commmunicate intelligently with
terminals (if your terminal has a help key, that's
all you need to push. WOW!!!).
Of course we've only had it for a few days, but it
finally something that makes my bosses happy.
I recommend it highly.
Jon Gallagher @ Pacific Bell
...!dual!qantel!pthya!jmg
P.S. Despite all of the foregoing, I am writing you on vi. Old
habits (and loves) die hard.
==================================================================
3. emacs
==================================================================
From decvax!ihnp4!uw-beaver!fluke!rzdz Tue Aug 21 08:14:26 1984
Here at Fluke, we use Emacs-264 for writing instruction manuals. What we have
is a locally written set of macros that make emacs look like (sorta) Word-11,
a program that Fluke also uses for corporate word-processing.
We like it. It works ok with nroff if you use the .nf command. We prefer it
since it acts like a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get).
We looked at Horizon a while ago, but they were still too young and foolish.
They wouldn't even talk about a potential schedule to port it to our vax
11-750.
We also looked at lex-11, another word-11 clone. Alas, that company copped out
after saying that they would have a unix port. We had to get our money back.
I would be interested in knowing what you end up with.
Rick Chinn
John Fluke Mfg. Co MS 232E
PO Box C9090 Everett WA 98206
(206) 356-5232
_____________________________________________________________________
From decvax!ucbvax!lcc.brett@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA Thu Aug 23 10:28:47 1984
You rejection of EMACS and vi is not well-founded. Since
EMACS and vi are both widely used, accepted, portable (emacs is
all around) you should maybe reconsider.
EMACS is not difficult to learn, especially with the INFO
database.
/brett fleisch
ucla computer science
locus computing corporation
____________________________________________________________________
From decvax!ucbvax!HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA Thu Aug 23 10:47:41 1984
You might want to rethink EMACS. We have some experience with this. We
started out on our DEC-20 with roughly the same reaction, that EMACS was
too complex for the average user. Thus we taught, and supported, a
quite competent but simpler editor. Slowly but surely all of our users
have migrated to EMACS, one by one as they needed some feature that only
it had. Interestingly enough, we found that we had to move our
secretaries first, as they needed the most serious word processing.
Since EMACS is configurable, you might consider designing a word
processor that you would like, and then configuring EMACS to look like
it. Our two biggest breakthroughs in making EMACS generally accessible were
1) putting the most commonly used functions on a keypad, so people
normally could use dedicated keys instead of those escape
sequences. [This is very easy to do -- in your system-wide
profile, put (bind-to-key "character sequence" "functionname")]
2) removing unnecessary commands from accessibility by novices.
-------
From decvax!RU-BLUE!ucbvax!@RUTGERS.ARPA:LATZKO Mon Aug 27 00:22:19 1984
Greetings:
We have had the Horizon wordprocessor and spreadsheet package up under
System III for about 8 months now an personally I hate it. As the maintainer
of it I can state I have never gotten it to work properly with the printers
I have here. In at least two of the distributions I got were missing files.
You might try a combination of EMACS and SCRIBE. I have been able to get
some very computer un-literate people working quite efficently in this
environment.
cheers
alex
<latzko@ru-blue>
-------
From decvax!wivax!cadmus!harvard!seismo!umcp-cs!chris Fri Aug 24 21:45:50 1984
A while ago I posted a set of diff listings to macros.c for Gosling
Emacs #264, to replace the macro initialization sort (an insertion
sort) with a quicksort, and to replace the keybound wired function
insertion code (linear search) with a quicksort + binary search. These
changes gave a somewhat significant improvement in Emacs' startup
time.
Is there any interest in my reposting the mods?
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci (301) 454-7690
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@maryland
____________________________________________________________________