seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) wrote...

>
> I'm setting up my old laptop for my mom - with any luck, she'll be
> as productive by tomorrow on it as she was on her old 386 DOS box
> laptop.  (Or more so.)
> 
> .
> .
> .
> 
> BTW, my mom's NetBSD laptop will be the subject of one of her
> nationally syndicated columns this week; I'll try to make sure it's
> mostly positive, although it's a bit hard to make the system quite
> as convenient as I'd like.
> 
> 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.  ;-)
> 
> 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 you'll find that a program called Nedit is perfect for your mom.
Here is the URL for its home page:

   http://www.nisu.flinders.edu.au/nedit/main.html

You can download the source code from this URL (please note that the
link on the home page to download the source is bad---use this URL
instead):

   http://www.nisu.flinders.edu.au/nedit/downloads/v5_0_2/
   
It is a GUI X Window editor program.  It is a text file editor, not a
word processor with multiple font sizes, tables and figures, etc.  It
does, however, do exactly what you want:  Auto justifying while you
type, moving words down to the next line as needed, or bringing them up
as you delete things.  It's totally automatic and doesn't require any
extra keypresses.

If you compile and run the program, it will *not* do the auto-
justifying by default.  You must select Preferences -> Wrap ->
Continuous to turn it on.  You can also select Preferences -> Wrap ->
Wrap Margin to set whether paragraphs justify to the width of the
window, or to a set characters-per-line amount (e.g.  72 for making
emails).

I think its neat that you're helping your mom use NetBSD.  I remember
when I was in middle school, I tried to teach my mom how to use the PC
and she got very frustrated and cried, etc.  She persisted, however,
making report cards (she's a 2nd grade teacher) on the computer and
other things.  Now she's so good at computers, she even gathered up all
the older, unwanted Macintosh computers at her school and made a network
in her classroom!  Her students can learn the sounds letters make, draw,
and make emails on the computers.

-Alex (:-)
 rbaxte03@harris.com