Needed: SIMPLE editor for users (SUMMARY)

Path: emory!ogicse!uwm.edu!wupost!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!wvus!pete From: pete@wvus.org (Pete Gregory) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.databases.informix Message-ID: <1991Oct16.182649.983@wvus.org> Date: 16 Oct 91 18:26:49 GMT Sender: pete@wvus.org (Pete Gregory - UNIX SA) Organization: World Vision U.S. Posted: Wed Oct 16 11:26:49 1991 Thanks for the load of responses to my posting asking for a SIMPLE editor for end-users. My original posting: >Hi - we need a *really* simple editor for use by end-users. reason: we >need to give a user an interface to enter data into a database blob (the >amount is about 5-25 lines on a screen). > >'vi' is out of the question - way too complicated for an end-user. >'emacs' might be okay if someone has put together a really simple interface. >'cat' is a little too crude. > >Anecdotes, ideas, source code - all appreciated. Replies follow: From: devet@info.win.tue.nl (Arjan de Vet) Try JOE, which appeared in alt.sources mid August. It looks a little like the Word-Star / Turbo-Pascal editor. Arjan -- Arjan de Vet -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- Eindhoven University of Technology Internet : devet@win.tue.nl -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- the Netherlands X.400 : c=nl;admd=400net;prmd=surf;o=tue;ou=win;s=devet -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* From: Philip Hazel <ph10@central-unix-service.cambridge.ac.uk> What exactly do you mean by SIMPLE? I have an editor (currently for Sun-4 only) which in depth is pretty complicated, but which might be considered simple at one level. It is called (simply) E, but its command is ee (but of course you can change that). You type "ee <file name". It puts the file on the screen. You move about with the cursor keys. You can type characters which then get inserted into the text. If you hit the right-hand margin, it automatically wordwraps. DELETE deletes characters. RETURN splits lines. Press F3 and it exits, prompting you as to whether you want to update the file or throw away your new version (provided you have made some changes). Is this simple enough? (Things like right-hand margin setting can be pre-configured so the user doesn't need to know.) There are many other facilities such as searching, formatting, multi-buffering, a command mode, keystroke configuring, etc., etc., but you don't need to know about them. (You can also run E as a filter.) -- Philip Hazel Internet: ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk Computing Service Janet: ph10@uk.ac.cam.cus University of Cambridge Phone: +44 223 334714 From: Jonathan I. Kamens <jik@pit-manager.mit.edu> There are several editors in the various source archives, including one called "simped" (I believe) which claims to be a simple editor. I suggest you read: Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,alt.sources.wanted,news.answers Available in the indicated USENET newsgroup(s), or via anonymous ftp from pit-manager.mit.edu (18.72.1.58) in the file: /pub/usenet/comp.sources.wanted/How_to_find_sources_(READ_THIS_BEFORE_POSTING) Also available from mail-server@pit-manager.mit.edu by sending a mail message containing: send usenet/comp.sources.wanted/How_to_find_sources_(READ_THIS_BEFORE_POSTING) Send a message containing "help" to get general information about the mail server. -- Jonathan Kamens jik@MIT.Edu MIT Information Systems/Athena Moderator, news.answers (Send news.answers-related correspondence to news-answers-request@MIT.Edu.) From: Paul Begley {remote} <peb@trac2000.ueci.com> We have bumped into this as well. The solution for us is taking MicroEMACS and hacking the key bindings to approximate WordStar. The next step was to create a mini-menu which is displayed across the top of the screen displaying the basic commands. uEMACS has less overhead than GNU EMACS, we eliminated all key bindings except the commands on the menu which support up, down, word left, word right, delete right, delete left, delete line - well you get the idea. Carve bind.h the way you want it. uEMACS compiles on almost any system. For our users group BBS (Philadelphia Area Computer Society) we stuck with version 3.8, the current version is 3.11 (to the best of my knowlege). From: harrison@faraday.physics.utoronto.ca (David Harrison) This is a tough problem. Our user community is undergraduate Physics students, and we wrestled with editors for a long time (~ 6 years!). If we were just going to do numbers, as it seems you are, we would probably have hacked up the public domain UNIX spreadsheet 'sc'. Since our users do a lot of number entry, but not exclusively, we thought that a single editor that could be in either numerical or text mode was preferrable; we never satisfactorily solved that problem when we were using conventional terminals. In fact editors are one of the big reasons why we went to X-terminals. A multi-window mouse-driven editor allows sophisticated features for those capable of handling it, while giving an intuitive 'point and click' mode for novices. -- David Harrison | "We place no reliance on virgin Dept. of Physics, Univ of Toronto | or pigeon, Inet: harrison@faraday.physics.utoronto.ca | Our method is science, our aim Uucp: ..!uunet!utgpu!utfyzx!harrison | is religion" - Crowley From: fritzz@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (fritz zaucker) There is a form.el package for Emacs that might be useful for your application. I can't find where to get it right now, so I just include it here. It is two parts, so look for ---- second part ---- . Fritz ---- cut here ---- <deleted for space - contact the author if you want it> -- Johan Vromans jv@mh.nl via internet backbones Multihouse Automatisering bv uucp: ..!{uunet,hp4nl}!mh.nl!jv Doesburgweg 7, 2803 PL Gouda, The Netherlands phone/fax: +31 1820 62911/62500 From: telxon!craign@uunet.uu.net (Craig Nirosky ) I wrote a simple full-screen editor for novice users. It is in the public domain. If you are interested, let me know and I will email the source code to you. I wrote the tt editor in C with the ATT curses package. I call it the tt editor since it is designed for touch typists - the user never needs to touch either the CTRL or ESC keys. Features and Constraints: - The commands are displayed on the screen so that the user does not not need to remember any commands. - The user does not need to have an understanding of the concept of newline characters. - Unlike vi and emacs, the cursor may be moved past the end of line. - The cursor's line and column numbers are always displayed. The editor can scroll sideways. - Like vi, it is a modal editor. (I realize that novice users do not like modal editors. I just hope the other features compensate for this.) - The editor cannot edit files containing control characters other than tabs and newlines. - The editor cannot edit files containing more than 5000 lines nor files contai