Topic: Text Editors & SMB Authentication

[James Phillips]

I am sure that many people will agree with me on this... Please get rid of VI for life and just use pico and try to use another program called Edit.

Can you try to also include a thing in the server-manager that can turn on SMB Authentication and asks you to specify a Doamin Controller IP Address and NETBIOS name? This would help office users in a very big way...

James Phillips

[robert]

Please do not get rid of vi ever. Thanks also for having the good sense to reinclude man in the latest beta.
:wq!

[Dennis McCunney]

>I am sure that many people will agree with me on this... Please get >rid of VI for life and just use pico and try to use another program
>called Edit.

 No agreement here...

The "edit" I know under Unix _is_ vi.  Vi, ex, and edit are all hard links to the same underlying executable.  It displays different behavior depending upon how it is called.

Pico is usable for quick and dirty stuff -- I've taught non-technical end-users at the office to use it to edit config files for an industry specific application -- and "nano" (an enhanced pico available under the GPL) is even better, but there are times when vi is what you need.

Yes, it's a rude shock to folks used to full screen editors under DOS/Windows.  Yes, the moded nature of the editor will drive you nuts until you get used to it.  But once you _have_ acquired some fluency, you can accomplish more in vi with less keystrokes than any other editor I can think of.

And if you don't use vi or pico, the other likely alternative is emacs.  That has everything _including_ the kitchen sink, and you can do anything with it, including read mail and news, play games, and run a shell.  But the learning curve is greater than vi, you have to develop at least some fluency in elisp to really use it, and it can be a memory and resource hog.

Bottom line: learn vi.  It can be a pain, but you need to learn it for the same reason folks used to learn WordStar under DOS.  You might not _like_ it, but it might be the only thing available on the machine you have to use.  

Vi is part of the standard Unix distribution.  Pico, emacs, and others normally aren't.  (Emacs is part of the standard Linux distribution, but doesn't come with Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, or other commercial Unix flavors I'm aware of.)
______
Dennis

[Kelvin]

Given that this _is_ a wish list for SME (and not any other version of *nix), I tend to agree with James.

For the most part, SME was designed so that you "should" (and I use "should" very lightly and carefully here) not need to get down into the guts of the system to play with it. This way, less sophisticated users and administrators (OK, dare I say it, we - who - have - not - attained - enlightenment), many of whom comes from a Windows world, can still manage and support SME. I must admit, I have some prior knowledge of Unix, and one of the things I MOST hated about it was vi and ALL its clones / sub-callings and what have you. Since I found out about pico (from these forums !), I've never turned back. It is nice to have as many really user friendly (or at least "user friendlier") programs to use as possible, like pico for text editing, midnight commander for file management and taper for backups (yes, I know about taper's 4GB limit but I also know which environments to deploy it into as well as which ones not to). So far, all the customisations to SME that I have done don't require any heavy duty text editing anyway. I have no objection to the vi engine being used to drive a text editor as long as the front end is a user friendly full screen editor. Dare I say it, even the MS-DOS Edit program is far simpler to use !

I remember a time when the word "wordprocessor" = WordStar. Then came MS Word and Word Perfect. Hmmm, last time I checked, WordStar = Huh ?? What's that ?? For that matter, a lot of people I know can say the same about WordPerfect as well !

The reality of the situation is that we have to change with the times. Otherwise, Mitel might just tell everyone that kernel 2.2.19 is the only version they will ever use. Hey it works now, why bother with 2.4.x ?? Oh, what's that ? They will be considering 2.4.x post version 5.5 ? Oh well, ....

My 2 bits.....

Kelvin

[francois zofel]

Let vi where it is. Use some userfriendly tool if you need so but let us our good old  editor. You can learn to use RPM to install the one you like.... is as simple as windows installer.
If e-smith is "made for the windows user" the windows user chose it _because_ it's a Linux and not a Windows. And Linux is good _because_ of it's great tools like vi. So it's not the good wish your are making... ask for a vi tutorial instead

zof.

[Lazo]

or why you don't use the editor on MC??