[comp.editors] Anyone tried the Sage editor?

psm@manta.NOSC.MIL (Scot Mcintosh) (08/31/90)

The Sage editor for MSDOS is being hyped quite heavily in
ads. Anyone tried it yet, and if so, how do you like it?

spolsky-joel@cs.yale.edu (Joel Spolsky) (09/02/90)

In article <1194@manta.NOSC.MIL> psm@manta.nosc.mil (Scot Mcintosh) writes:
>The Sage editor for MSDOS is being hyped quite heavily in
>ads. Anyone tried it yet, and if so, how do you like it?

I tried it, not for very long. I hated it. This might be a hasty
conclusion; if you have the patience to grow to love this product,
go for it. The biggest problems I had were:

* quirky windowing interface which is not IBM SAA/CUA compliant
(meaning the mouse, windows, and menu bars do not necessarily work
exactly as you expect them to)

* The multiplicity of modes makes the documentation a mess. For every
function there are several possible bindings, and the printed
documentation did not even describe the mode I wanted to use, Emacs
mode! The pull-down menubar wasn't always there; to get it you had to
type M-x menu <cr> which I thought was a bit of a pain in the @. Since
there was no documentation on emacs mode I got frustrated and gave up
on this editor.

Joel Spolsky
spolsky@cs.yale.edu                                        Talk Hard.