gww@aphasia.UUCP (George Williams) (10/10/85)
I have recently be force to play with Macintoshes and Lisas, and would like to describe some of my thoughts on using their editors. Firstly the editors are very easy to use, I read no documentation (I had none) and was able to get to work almost at once. There are about five pull down menus at the top of the screen (worked by a mouse) and are all fairly self-explainitory for anyone who has ever edited. The most difficult thing I found was to create a new file, instead of having a menu item called "Create New File", there is something called "Tear Off Stationary" (hardly intuitive to my mind) which then asks you for a stationary file to tear off of (I have no notion what this may mean, I always used the default). The thing I dislike most about the editors is that I am forced to use a mouse. When I edit I don't want to lift my hands off the keyboard, I don't even like reaching over to a set of function keys, it slows me down. But if I have to reach over to the mouse, and move it all around the screen to get anything done, I have to stop typing. Another obnoxious habit of the mouse is that its cursor does not follow me as I type, this means that if I make a mistake on the previous word after typing for 4 pages solid then I have to move the mouse forward 4 pages. I suggest that until humans evolve a third hand (or someone puts a keyboard on a mouse) that these little beasts be called snails instead. George Williams decvax!frog!aphasia!gww
guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (10/17/85)
> The thing I dislike most about the editors is that I am forced to use a > mouse. When I edit I don't want to lift my hands off the keyboard, I > don't even like reaching over to a set of function keys, it slows me down. This is somewhat of a matter of personal taste; an editor we had at CCI used function keys for a number of operations, and I got used to the keypad on a VT100 and it didn't slow me down. On the other hand, using control keys for functions can be a pain, because on my Sun I sometimes miss the control key and drop a letter into the file instead. Editors should, however, give you accelerators for commonly-performed functions; the Mac and Lisa editors do so (the Apple key on the Lisa and the cloverleaf key on the Mac act as control/"code" keys). A program which qualifies as the Ferrari Testarossa of word processors - Interleaf, Inc.'s <fill_in_the_blank> Publishing System (the blank fills up with different names depending on which version you get) - is mouse based (and an Interleaf person I saw using it was able to do picture editing *very* quickly with the mouse). However, it also has a number of control-key accelerators; they resemble the commands of - well, take the name of this newsgroup and delete the first four characters... Guy Harris