>Speaking of which:  Are there any text editors which have a mode
>where paragraph justification happens constantly?  Emacs probably
>has one, but I don't think I want to start my mom on Emacs.  ;-)

in emacs, i press esc-q and it justifies everything (in the paragraph
that the "point" is in) to the left.  sometimes i press esc-1-esc-q
and it justifies "fully" (ie right and left margins align).  the
"fill-column" is. by default, set to 72.

>What I want is an editor which produces plain-old-ASCII, but where,
>if you delete text in the first line in a "paragraph"
>(blank-line-delimited, I suppose) it reformats and wraps text to
>keep lines roughly N characters, for N near 72.  This would be very
>useful, as what she really wants is just a plain ASCII word processor.
>I've had editors like this for DOS, but none of the Unix ones I
>know of do it; "justify" is always a separate action you take.

i think pico (part of the pine distribution) is what you want.  but i
hate pico, so don't ask me how to use it.  :)

pico is the *bane* of (perhaps long) line-oriented config files.

-- 
|-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----|
codewarrior@daemon.org             * "ah!  i see you have the internet
twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown)                that goes *ping*!"
andrew@crossbar.com       * "information is power -- share the wealth."