emacs in default selection ?

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 17:39 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 08:27:07PM -0300, Fábio Mendes wrote:
> 
> > Why two console editors? Why not just link vi to nano?
> 
> Because when a user runs "vi", they expect something which acts like vi.
> 
On a more psychological level; sysadmins and ultra-power-users
everywhere know vi, they trust vi, when a program advertises itself as
vi there's a baseline of functionality they expect.

There's no such trust for "nano".  One of the greatest fears I've ever
heard of is that it'll wrap, re-indent or in some other way alter the
contents of the file you're editing -- whether this is true or not, it's
irrelevant, it's whether users are willing to trust it and therefore use
it.

For now we're still at the stage where we *might* need an editor that is
suitable for emergency fixing of a system, not necessarily by our users
themselves but by the person down the road who "knows about computers",
and they need an editor they can trust.

Usability is a factor, but it isn't the traditional "can my grand[pm]a
use it?" that we're used to thinking about, it's a "would someone who
knows what they're doing trust this editor to do exactly what they
say?" 

vi fulfils this requirement; when it comes to picking vi clones and
compatibles, we only want to pick one and vim is the most capable of
them, so we've picked that one.

In effect, vi isn't in the "console editor" category -- it's in a
category of it's own, the "vi, or equivalent" category.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at canonical.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20041007/ce9f9b21/attachment.pgp