Re: How many of us are there left?

[Raphael rtennenbaum@xxxxxxxx]

Emacs always kind of scared me, mostly probably thanks to the superior
tone of its users, so I never got near it. It took me a couple of years
to not be frightened of nano, the default editor in naked Linux, so I
know what you mean about line-centered editing. But Vim's
paragraph-editing nature really is precisely like XyWrite -- more so
(forgive me), at least in *nix, since carriage returns break paragraphs,
not lines. The trick is getting the hang of its primary modes: the
somewhat counterintuitively-named "normal" -- which is really "edit";
"insert," which I think of as "writing." Normal mode features lots of
speedy one- and two-keystroke commands for moving and manipulating text
and cursor (maybe something like WordStar, which I never used), and is
also the gateway to the "command colon" -- normally at the bottom of the
screen, though I would be very surprised if it can't be moved to the top.
As content as I was using XyWrite, it's reassuring to use a tool which
apart from offering everything I need, is firmly rooted in the guts of
the OS -- eliminating anxiety about the vagaries of emulation down the road.
I'm absolutely certain that if your XyWrite is not broken there is no
need for you to fix it, Carl. On the other hand, it probably took me
twenty tries to get through Swann's Way Lord knows how long ago, but
I've reread A le recherche twice now, and look forward to the next few
goes -- once you get on it, it's like floating down an idyllic river,
and no place you'd rather be.

-Rafe

On 12/07/2014 09:02 PM, Carl Distefano wrote:
Reply to note from Raphael  Sun, 07 Dec 2014
16:37:02 -0500
Just recently moved to Vim (a nod to Russ U. for the nudge)
where I am happy as I've ever been with Xy.
Interesting, Rafe. When my XP machine was on its last legs I
anticipated making a similar move. I revisited Emacs and found (as I
had many years earlier) that I couldn't get comfortable with it. Vim
was next on my list, but now that vDos has made it possible to
integrate Xy-DOS with 64-bit Windows, it's become a much lower
priority, if not totally moot. My basic problem with Emacs and other
programmer-oriented editors is that they're, at the core, line
editors, whereas XyWrite, whatever its perceived limitations, is,
first and last, a paragraph editor. And as I tend to think, however
prosaically, in paragraphs, this, along with its customizability,
lifts Xy to the level of a thought-processor for me. I suppose I
could get to the same place with another capable editor, and I may
still look into Vim based on its reputation and evdiently thriving
user community, but life is short and art is proverbially long, and
two years after I first cracked it I'm still only into Chapter 2 of
À la recherche du temps perdu....