Re: Simple editor that supports line wrapping
On 2004-07-29 01:25 +0200, Andre Majorel wrote:
> I'm looking into installing Mutt on my mom's machine. Saying that
> my dear mother is not a technical person would be putting it
> mildly. Having her use Mutt is crazy enough in itself ; I'd rather
> keep the editor side of things as simple as possible. This means
> that vi is out, and emacs probably is as well.
>
> I'm looking for a simple editor suitable for editing mail in Mutt,
> more or less Notepad-in-an-xterm. Desirable features :
>
> - run in an xterm,
>
> - support ISO-8859-1,
>
> - be modeless,
>
> - not let the user accidentally get into a mode that a retard
> wouldn't know how to get out of (think hitting ^Z or Q in vi),
>
> - wrap lines automatically to a specified width,
>
> - support the sort of bindings a Windows user might expect (arrow
> keys, [home], [end], [shift][ins] to paste, selection by [shift]
> + movement).
>
> Undesirable features :
>
> - macros, regexps, and generally anything beyond the scope of
> Notepad. If she ever needs doing something complicated, I'll
> make her start vi and hand-hold her through the process.
>
> Neither nano nor joe seem to fit the bill. Any other ideas ?
Thank you for your suggestions.
Of all the suggested editors, only mcedit comes closes to being
intuitive for a Microsoft user. It has almost all the usual
bindings. The only deviation I noticed is that pressing [del] with
some text selected removes the character under the cursor, not the
selection.
It doesn't wrap lines by default, but Michelle says it can be set
so I'll keep looking.
A serious issue is that it drops non-ASCII characters. This could
be fatal. I hope there is a way around this.
Other than that, Mom is happy. She was able to read, send and
reply without panicking. It'll be interesting to see how she
reacts when she realises that she can't see images inline as in a
graphical client. <g>
Thank you all.
--
André Majorel <amajorel@xxxxxxxxx>
http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/