vi? What's wrong with emacs? You can do anything with emacs . ..
[note range war beginning]
How to fix my problem? (word processor)
- Thread starter BlueDimity
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vi? What's wrong with emacs? You can do anything with emacs . ..
[note range war beginning]
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I used to, back when I was running Red Hat 5.2 on a machine I built myself. It had an AMD K6 CPU and 128MB of RAM.
And Word has one of the worst. I've seen it use eighty characters of code to format a single space.
I copy/paste into Notepad, then copy/paste from there, to strip out all the obnoxious unnecessary code. If you use shortcut keys it takes, literally, two seconds.
Back in the days of DOS I worked tech support for Enable, software that allowed multiple windows in a DOS enviromemnt. A woman called raving about how great the word processor was, which surprised me because it was merely adequate, nothing special. I asked her what she had been using before, and she said, "You're going to think I'm stupid if I tell you." I assured her I wouldn't.
She started as a secretary with no computer experience. Her boss gave her a DOS manual and told her to type up a letter for him. For six months she did all his correspondence in EDLIN, because that was all she could find in the manual. When someone asked her what kind of word processor she used she said, "Word Processor? That sounds like a great idea!"
I didn't think she was stupid. To the contrary, I was very impressed that anyone, with no training and nothing but a DOS manual, could figure out how to use EDLIN and DOS well enough to write and print business letters.
My first computer experience was learning C on a PDP-11 running Unix version 7. All I had for generating text was a line editor similar to EDLIN. You entered the line number for each line you wanted to edit. As bad as this sounds, it's more natural for programming (where a line is a logical unit) than for normal text where you'd want line wrap.
The first computer that I owned was an Apple II+ that I beefed up by adding a CP/M card, an 80-column card (default was 40 cols in those days), and a memory upgrade to 48K total RAM (for disk storage I had 128K single-sided floppies). Anyway, I finally had my first word processor -- Wordstar -- except my keyboard had no shift key (all caps in those days). I got lower-case with the 80-column card, but I had to configure Ctrl-A as the shift key.
Ah, memories.
The first computer that I owned was an Apple II+ that I beefed up by adding a CP/M card, an 80-column card (default was 40 cols in those days), and a memory upgrade to 48K total RAM (for disk storage I had 128K single-sided floppies). Anyway, I finally had my first word processor -- Wordstar -- except my keyboard had no shift key (all caps in those days). I got lower-case with the 80-column card, but I had to configure Ctrl-A as the shift key.
Ah, memories.
Absolutely, there's no such thing as geek humor. I'm shocked shocked at some of the implications in this thread.
Now, I'm going to go back to my object-oriented COBOL, and hope you kids stay offa my lawn.
Now, I'm going to go back to my object-oriented COBOL, and hope you kids stay offa my lawn.
Object oriented? Pfft. Structured was good enough for Grandpa, it should be good enough for you.
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Pfft. My grandma Ada did her hacking on a purely mechanical computer; she didn't even have paper tape, she thought a hard drive was something a husband gave his wife at night.
Does anyone remember Scripsit from Radio Shack for the TRS-80. The first time I saw those green words wrap around to the next line, I was flabbergasted. I sat and look at the screen for nearly a minute, and then found I could insert a word and delete words. I was in heaven.