According to Laine Stump:
>
>Okay okay, point taken. So let's just say that emacs is "less modal" than
>vi, since entering text and moving the cursor are the same mode. 
>

Heh - we deployed emacs as the editor of choice for our "shop floor"
people when they were using elm for their mailer for exactly this
reason.  I could just imagine the help-desk calls and confusion trying
to explain when you are in or out of insert mode (yeah, I know you can
tell vi to tell you when you are but who reads the bottom of the
screen anyway? ;-)  The only thing we had to explain with emacs was
how to get out of the damn thing ;-)

<shameless plug>
Actually, if someone is interested in writing a simple editor then
there has been a nice library called libmenu committed to -current
recently that will do all the menuing stuff for you nicely.  This
includes searching through menu items matching typed characters,
scrolling option lists - all sorts of things.

Oh, that and the updated curses library does know how to assemble
function/arrow key escape sequences for you.

The combination of these features should cover a lot of what needs to
be done to implement a very basic editor.
</shameless plug>

-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
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