43 karma · joined October 30, 2019
It was like an editing PVP game where these would be fixed in near real-time by others in the document we were working on :-)
Yes the web text today removes these today but I still prefer reading text in the old RFC document style where it's not only fixed width fonts, but also right and left column justified. In emacs this can be done by selecting a region and doing a C-u ESC q
:-)
At school we had lots of Sun{2,3,4}, Apollo, HP, Mac, and NeXT computers which we could practice on. Kinda saw the writing on the wall when we got a 6 CPU i386 sequent symmetry system and then SPARC, MIPS RISC, and PowerPC while nothing really from Motorola. I never enjoyed programming x86 cpus after being self taught on 6502 and then m68k systems :-)
I still have an ATARI Mega ST and a Sun 2 at home for sentimental reasons only.
In any event I guess the whining about editors will never stop but meanwhile they seem to be GoodEnough(tm) for me and most things.
Emacs used to be mocked for being bigger than the OS but now I think most editors are much larger. I used to work at a University lab helpdesk of sorts where first time users of UNIX systems would ask us for help getting started entering their first CSCI programs on a Sun or other UNIX-like os and my unscientific but high n observation is that vi, emacs, ed or cat all worked and occasionally people would find a way to get confused equally on any method when starting out. Level of education didn’t seem to make a difference.
Editor ergonomics seem to be very personal, like furniture so I’m glad we have so many options.
On another side note I am glad that most text input fields across many operating systems and applications usually do the right thing with Emacs cursor control sequences e.g. CTRL-a, CTRL-n, CTRL-p, CTRL-e. So hopefully that legacy lives on