Very Computer

 >I am new to Solaris and am administering a sparcserver 1000 with version
 >2.4.
 >My users (being pain in the a**e mainframe users mainly) want a

This implies you are not a mainframe type? :)

 >'friendlier' editor than vi. Does anyone have any polite suggestions
 >please.

I have been using UNIX as my main computing platform for ~12 years and have
never been very thrilled by vi.  Actually before I started using UNIX I had
learned a PC word processor named Perfect Writer, which was a descendent of
MINCE (MINCE is not complete EMACS), so was predisposed to look for some
kind of EMACS clone.  GNU EMACS was too big to run on the 286 hardware I was
running UNIX on, so I quickly found MicroEMACS and jove.  Several years ago
I gave up on uEMACS.  When I bring up a new UNIX box or start working at a
client site or get a new account, the only thing I use vi for is to edit the
config and makefiles to bring up jove.  From that point on I use jove almost
exclusively.  Jove is small and quick-to-load like vi, but has many of the
features of EMACS, minus the LISP extention language.  It also has fairly
good online help, which is the biggest deficiency of vi, after the mode
nonsense.  Jove does have filesize and linelength limits, plus it cannot
load binary files since it uses normal string functions to manipulate text,
which means that a line terminates at a NULL.

The canonical distribution site for jove is
relay.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/moraes/.

Having said all that, jove is not very popular with most PC and mainframe
users.

Another very good EMACS clone is JED, which is superior in many ways to
jove.  One of the things I like about jove is that I only have to move one
binary to get it moving.  JED is extensible with its own language, slang,
and requires that many files be installed.  Its distribution site is at
Harvard, where John Davis, the author, is a student I believe.  One good
place to find about JED is comp.editors.  JED has Wordstar, EMACS, and EDT
modes.

For users who want something simple, pico is very good.  pico comes with
pine, which is also the best mailtool for users who do not want to become
UNIX experts.  Although there are a couple of design problems with pine, it
is extremely powerful and makes it very easy to manipulate mail folders.
pine has its own newsgroup as well, comp.mail.pine.  pico keeps an onscreen
help menu all the time.  pico started life as a subset of uEMACS, but is
much easier to use, also less powerful.

For users who want a very powerful, easy to use editor with good onscreen
help, joe is also a very good choice.  It is almost as easy to use as pico,
but almost as powerful as jove.  The best place to find out about it is
comp.editors.

 >Kevin Briddon
 >**********************************************************************
 >* The views and comments contained herein are purely personal and in *
 >* no way represent the views and beliefs of the Signet Group plc.    *
 >**********************************************************************
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