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

[Guy Harris]

> One of the winning features of vi is its use of normal alphabetic
> characters as commands, so that when you are on some non-standard
> keyboard, everything still works (ESC is sometimes the only problem --
> there *are* keyboards with no ESC character!).

If you like the "vi" user interface, particularly its use of alphabetic
characters as commands, there's an editor with WYSIWYG word-processing
capabilities that might be perfect.  It's called Bravo, and runs on the
Xerox Alto; I think "vi"s user interface was influenced by Bravo's, down to
the "i" for insert command, terminated by ESC.  WYSIWYG processing and a
"vi"-like user interface - the best of both worlds! :-)  It also had a
number of good ideas in its editing and formatting mechanism; a number of
other editor/formatters probably owe many of their good ideas to Bravo.

Of course, there's the apocryphal story of the user typing the word "edit"
when they didn't know they weren't inside an "insert" command; "e" selected
the Entire document, "d" Deleted the selection, "i" started an Insert
command, and "t" inserted a "t".  Realizing their mistake, they hit ESC and
"u" (or whatever the Undo command was), and Bravo dutifully undid the
insertion.  Unfortunately, it only had a one-level undo list....

That's one reason why I *strongly* dislike "vi"; it's a moded editor.

> Editors which are heavily dependent on the function keys of a specific
> keyboard (not that I'm thinking of any *particular* editor! :-) tend to
> be a real pain to use on others.

You're definitely not thinking of EMACS; it uses control keys and ^X-key or
ESC-key sequences by default for most commands.  You *can* bind commands to
function keys, but you don't have to.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)