Re: Adding a simple editor to the base system

[markucz%gmail.com@localhost]

> > > - may not want to learn
> > Sooner or later he'll have to.
> 
> Tell that to the guy on the phone in the data centre and tell it to your
> wife. "Sooner or later you'll have to learn this Unix thing."
It boils down to that, yes.

> So your proposition is: right off the bat we force new users to spend time
> reading technical literature in order to learn an editor (vi) that behaves
> unlike almost every other visual editor made for a consumer microcomputer.
>
> This winning strategy excludes a basic skill held by most young adults in
> the western world: using a text editor. How will this help to attract and
> retain new users, and what benefit does it have for existing users?
What kind of new users do you want to attract? Totally clueless? I tend to
separate new users into two categories: those who want to learn something,
and those who don't. Those who do will greatly benefit from reading a few man
pages. vi(1) hardly counts as "technical literature", although reading such is
very useful in the long term. vi isn't exactly intuitive but if you have some
spare minutes, you can make it do what you want. There's also the cheat-sheet
from USD:12. That's why there *is* documentation, right?

Those with no desire to learn, my hypothetical wife included, will probably
go straight to Desktop NetBSD (which has/will have Gnome and therefore a very
simple editor, gedit) or, more likely, Linux.

Really, using Unix presumes (requires, actually) that one wants to learn a
thing or two. If one can't do as much as use a text editor, one won't be using
BSD either. Call me biased if you want.

To recap: having ee/edit is fine as long as it doesn't become part of base.tgz

Best regards.