Fat.Tag@SU-SIERRA.ARPA (11/12/83)
From: Tim Gonsalves <Fat.Tag@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> Thanks to all who replied to my recent request for info on The Final Word and Perfect Writer. Appended are summaries of the replies I received. My apologies if my editing has inadvertently changed the import of any message. Tim Gonsalves Gonsalves@Su-Sierra.Arpa ------- I'm not a user but I can send you some half-informed gossip. The editor part of PerfectWriter seems to be an "ersatz emacs" (as Stallman calls them). I don't know if the key bindings are the same but the functionality is, and I believe that you can change key bindings. The text formatting program looks like a perfect subset of Scribe. I looked at the manual and it was sure a hell of a lot better written than UniLogic's Scribe manual. ------ perfect writer is essentially EMACS. Not extensible, though. ------- I've tried PW and own Mince (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs) and FW for the IBM PC. Perfect Software negotiated w/ Mark of the Unicorn (Mince & FW people) to sell their Minceclone, but since I prefer Mince to PW I'll talk about it instead. How close to Emacs is Mince? Almost the same key bindings but no fancy stuff (e.g. query replace yes w/o recursive edits, but pascal mode no). 7 files/buffers, 2 windows max. Uses swap file for virtual memory, 256k max; I keep it on a ramdisk. Is it extensible? Comes with lots of C source in case you want to add modes, change bindings etc. and have a C compiler (they used Lattice [Microsoft]). It does enough for me so I don't bother. What is its formatter like? Mince has a matching formatter Scribble, a tiny Scribeclone. (List$: Mince or Scribble $175, both $275) Chapters, sections, footnotes, headers, index & ToC, refs, supports many printers well at once; no bibliography, device dover,... FW's formatter is the same. Does it have the forward/reverse modes of the FW? No. FW is a newer product, has a faster CRT driver, allows 12 buffers, has DIRED, allows printspooling, lets you continue after exiting (remembers buffers etc from swap file), but has key bindings incompatible w/ mince. However, ProKey will make 'em very close, and I have a hacked-up FW that looks like mince too. Note Scribble does come w/ C source but not FW. ------- I haven't used either of these, but i have used mince (which is fully customizeable) and these other two are clones. I am very pleased with mince, and it seems to be an accurate subset of emacs (as per the name). one person i know has decided to go to vedit (PC) which he claims is different from emacs but contains more of the spirit than the mince clones. i have completely switched over from the loosing WS editor (although any reasonable screen editor would have supplanted that monster) to mince, and would suspect that the same would have been true for the clones. only prob with the clones is that FW is not customizable yet and PW won't be. the text processor is a Scribe clone and, although more complete than the nroff type of beastie which is public domain from CUG, i don't really care for it. my main prob w/it is that it really requires a prop space word qual printer to use it to the fullest, and i only have an FX-80 (which, by the way, is a truly incredible printer). ------ I've worked with EMACS, and both MINCE and the Final Word from Mark of the Unicorn. MINCE is quite close to EMACS. The Final Word is based on the EMACS style of editing but uses a completely different user interface based on an orthogonal command set. That is, you specify the direction in which you want to go (FORWARD/REVERSE), the kind of object you want to affect (CHARACTER/WORD/...) and the operation. Although better for naive users, the Final Word tended to require too many keystrokes for ex-EMACS users. The key/command rebinding feature was nice, but since not all of the original EMACS commands were provided, it was impossible to make the Final Word look exactly right. The integration of formatting with editing in the Final Word was a bit hokey, but worked well. Bottom line: I no longer use the Final Word, but now stick to EMACS and MINCE and an external formatter. -------- I use PW on an IBM PC. PW is quite close in the commands that exist to the emacs commands, but it has no M-X commands, or C-C commands. It also has no keyboard macros (the biggest complaint). Finally, the alt key is not implemented in the current version as a meta key (version 1.00). You have to use escape. Mince, which is another emacs look-alike, does use the alt key, but is much slower. On the positive side, PW has a scribe-like formatter, which while it has some bugs in it, is still pretty good. --------- I've been using PW for about 10 mos. now, first on a Kaypro and now on a Columbia MPC. PW seems to be an implementation of most of the standard EMACS commands, with a few extras thrown in for convenience (and a few left out for inconvenience). It is not extensible. In the stock version and in Final Word there is a program that will let you rebind the keys after a fairly hairy editing session on a messy bindings definition file. All in all, I feel satisfied with PW -- there have only been one or two times that I've really wanted to write a mock-lisp command. The Perfect Formatter on the other hand is almost useless. It tries to do too much for the user. Instead of letting you define a format with a set of primitives, it provides a (incomplete) set of predefined environments. These are adequate for simple business documents or papers, but not for technical reports or dissertations. Perhaps the most annoying thing about it is that it makes you specify several major style parameters at the start of a document and won't let you change them at any later point (margins, for example). Nor does it support printing parts of a document separately so that you can change style -- you can't chain documents with different styles and it won't let you adjust page numbers (to fake it) if you print them separately. It also goes out of its way to use obscure printer features. Other complaints include: Won't let you keep a long bibliography, won't create a table of contents unless you number chapters its way, etc., etc., etc. All in all, I've decided to scrap it in favor of another stand alone formatter if I can find one (Microscript by Microtype looks pretty good....) The rest of the perfect package is pretty nice. I especially like the fact that it integrates well (all of the file formats are compatible and the menu system works pretty well -- though it sometimes forgets what file you were working on, and isn't smart enough to apply the proper suffix all of the time). The speller is adequate although I really prefer The Word Plus. In summary, I think I would recommend the editor (or Mince) but not the formatter. The formatter is good at formatting letters. ----- The FW formatter does not handle bibliographies automatically -- a drawback for technical articles. Otherwise, seems an adequate subset of Scribe. ----- -------