22 Feb
2013
22 Feb
'13
2:23 p.m.
On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 08:09 -0500, Rob wrote:
On 02/22/2013 03:47 AM, david wrote:
What makes something an "expert" piece of software is simply that it's not
aimed at the layman. vi, emacs and dwm were meant for software developers
and system administrators to use. And a musician who's also one of those
things will probably be able to figure out those programs. A musician who
isn't should probably use leafpad or something like that. Anything more
involved and they're not going to be able to figure out how to turn on
syntax highlighting, regular expression search and replace, autocompletion,
etc. anyway.
Text editing isn't rocket science, but when vi and emacs were originally
written, it was computer science. Since then it's just been 30-40 years of
iteration to make them more capable without much thought to whether someone
accustomed to Windows Notepad could use them. I've used both for about 25
years, and have no use for the (to me ill-advised) menu extensions that
don't really help noobs use them while taking up space on my screen that
could be used for one or two more lines of code.
For those poor laymen who have to edit files from the command line, we have
nano now. I still get questions from people who allegedly have degrees in
my field about functions that are prominently displayed in its little menu
at the bottom of the screen. Instead of reading the screen, they've been
trained to look for File/Save.
Software meant for the layman but that's difficult to use, on the other
hand, is just poorly-written software. (Expert software can be bad too,
but usually that doesn't last 30 years.)
Rob
I'm not accustomed to Windows editors, in the past I used all kinds of
complicated editors, such as the first C64 Assembler editors, C editors
for DR DOS etc., but today I expect more comfort. I'm not aware about
syntax highlighting for Leafpad or that it can be used by the command
line. I neither program professional, nor just for interest, but I need
a command line editor to set up *NIX systems and for doing this I expect
an intuitive to use editor, such as mcedit.
>>
dwm has both idiosyncrasies and a learning curve, but so too do most
>> "expert" pieces of software. vim and emacs are the canonical examples,
Being hard to learn doesn't make something an "expert" piece of
software -
unless you're talking about a *field* that requires lots of expertise such
as rocket science. Text editing isn't rocket science. A text editor
shouldn't be as hard to learn as rocket science. ;-)