Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 23:27:38 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk (Paul Richards) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, nawaz921@cs.uidaho.edu, chuckr@glue.umd.edu, freebsd-chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <199605231357.XAA08987@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199605231313.OAA23966@cadair.elsevier.co.uk> from "Paul Richards" at May 23, 96 02:13:18 pm
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Paul Richards stands accused of saying: > > > > It becomes the default editor for _root_. FCOL, will people at least > > try to remember what the issues here are? > > Maybe I missed something here. Wasn't the change to the skel files. If > it's only root's EDITOR that gets changed I find it an even sillier > decision since as an ordinary user you'll still be using vi !!!!! You really just aren't thinking about this one. The whole idea is to put a new user, who may be an extremely experienced DOS, Novell, whatever user, who is not in the slightest scared of configuration files, in a situation where they're not faced with a _totally_ inscrutable editor to deal with this. There is no hope for the totally klueless user installing FreeBSD. Nobody has ever suggested that there might be. But the above class of new user is _very_ common. Picking an editor that doesn't need to be explained lessens _significantly_ the steep end of the learning curve. Trust me; I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years explaining how to do truly trivial things with vi to people who should never had needed to know. > > > Personally, I don't give a damn if some newbie gets scared off Unix > > > because it doesn't have notepad. As I've already said, if they can't > > > get over that hurdle then they can forget it because the rest of the > > > stuff they have to learn is much scarier. I think that some people have > > > > Bollocks. You've obviously been away from the coalface _much_ too long. > > Ehh? I've got no idea what you're alluding to here? I'm suggesting that you had not significant interaction with users learning Unix sufficiently recently to remember anything much about it. > I agree, I'm not forcing people to use vi, there are lots of editors > available under FreeBSD but I'm serious in saying that if you can't > overcome the hurdle of not having a DOS like editor then Unix really > isn't for you. No matter how much you try and claim otherwise Unix is > not a system for the casual computer user, you do need considerable > computing knowledge to use it. ... so we should do everything in our power to make it harder for people to come by such knowledge? Ok, let's split /etc/sysconfig up again into a dozen configuration files. Let's remove all the comments, and use a different syntax for all of them. Hell, let's stop using raw text; I'm sure vi can handle editing binaries, so let's just put everything in a big patch area in 'init'. > I've asked this already, what editor does Linux provide by default. People > move from Windows to Linux in droves so if anyone is getting this newbie > stuff right it's the Linux crowd. pico. > This might be an interesting piece of research. My gut feeling is that people > who really want to learn unix are those who have an interest in that sort > of level of admin and casual computer users find it too much work and stick > with windows. Given that breakdown of users the first group tend to not have > any problem learning a new editor. You're not thinking about the people who started with something else and find that it's not up to doing whatever they want (webserving, fileserving, image manipulation, etc.). Lots of these people are migrating to Unices, and many of them to FreeBSD. Some of them (eg. my employer) are producing products based on these systems that will be delivered to technically literate but Unix illiterate customers. In _many_ of these scenarios, a default, straightforward text editing tool can change a series of instructions that reads "type vi /etc/resolv.conf, then d,d,o,nameserver 1.2.3.4,esc,colon,q,enter" to "change the nameserver entry in /etc/resolv.conf to 1.2.3.4" I'll tell you which one _I'll_ want to explain to someone who speaks english like I do swahili on the other end of a crappy phone line. I'd even live with an alias in root's .cshrc for 'edit'. > I'm not arguing from the position that learning vi should be an > initiation procedure for getting into unix, I'm trying to get the point > across that changing the editor isn't going to change the fundamental > nature of what unix is, it just prolongs the point before people > realise what they're getting in to. As Chuck put it, it lowers the fear barrier. This is _important_. > Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd. (Netcraft Ltd. contractor) -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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