On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 09:21:43PM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Jukka Marin wrote:
> 
> 	Attempted summary of discussion to date:
> 
> 	Reasons against:
> 		- If someone cannot learn vi, they should not be editing
> 		  system files on unix.
> 		- sysinst should be able to install a simple editor.
> 		- small amount of bloat.
Agree!
 
> 	Reasons for:
I think the real reason for is, that vi presents novice users a bootstrapping
problem and has become a bottleneck for many new to unix, i.e. it
takes more time to get comfortable with vi than to get a NetBSD
machine configured and running nowadays. But I don't like moving users
away from the vi-learning-curve by adding some other simple editor, as in 
the end it really pays off to learn vi. Maybe an alternative is to make vi's
learning curve a bit less steep and give vi a -novice option which
would add a more verbose status line at the bottom (listing mode and
the most essential command keys) or maybe even an ncurses menu with 
load/save file and quit. A builtin help-page would be nice too. Maybe
making such a vin (vi for novices) part of the sysinst/bootflop would
be good enough?

Feico.