Use of ``vi'' for business office word-processing

[harrison at utfyzx.UUCP]

In article <1246 at kitty.UUCP> larry at kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes:
>	So my question is: Am I WRONG in advising people to stay with ``vi''
>and not spend money for "word-processing software" in the BUSINESS APPLICATION
>environment?

I have been involved in word-processing in the Physics Dept.  Because
of the math requirements, WYSIWIG's were pretty well excluded, so we
used eqn, tbl, and troff.  Once the decision to use an embedded-command
WP system was made, we had to teach our secretaries an editor, and
found that there was little problem in using "vi".  So, I would tend to
say that you are not wrong.  As to WYSIWIG vs. embedded-command WP
systems, net.text is the appropritate forum for that discussion.

However:  we also found that teaching "vi" first led to some blocks
in our users learning naked UNIX that were removed if we taught
them "ed" first.  This is now pretty general for me: I teach users
good-old "ed", and when they are fairly comfortable show them "vi".
Thus, they get exposed to UNIX regular expressions, etc., before
going full-screen.  ( I also use sh, not csh, to give you some idea
of my prejudices in these matters. )

I suspect that the success of our teaching of "ed" was partly aided
by the fact that we use the "U of T Zoology" version of it, which
includes an excellent line-editing mode, browsing commands, and other
nice features.  I've never tried to teach a naive user vanilla ed.
-- 
    David Harrison, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Toronto
    {ihnp4,utzoo}!utcs!utfyzx!harrison