FW: PLUG: OT: AD\/:ETC - Good training for mouse-challenged *nixpeople

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what Bill Campbell said here...:
> 
> Then there was the WordStar diamond, that used the xon/xoff keys
> for cursor control or some such.

Ooooh...another person that knew WordStar!  Ah, that brings back memories.
I was one of the few office temps that knew it.  I was the -only- office
temp I ever met that actually knew Word/36.  If you ever had the misfortune
of having to use it, you'll realise that's a curse, not a blessing.  :)

One of my favourites is still Apple's word processor for the ][e.  I can't
for the life of me remember the name though.  I want to say AppleWriter ][
but that was the printer line, not the word processor.

Probably -the- best was MS Word 4.0 for the Mac (System 6 was around back
then, to give you an idea how dated it is).  Every version since then,
including the "fancy" features of the native Windows version of Word is
simply superfluous.  I've never used a better version, ever.  I prefer it
to Word 2000.  It looked, worked, and "felt" better than any other version
as well.

WordPerfect 5.1 was good.  It was the king of ASCII.  I started hating WP
when they went GUI around late v5 and then v6.  Horrid.

> The worst though is all the Windows programmers that think that a
> single ESC character is a command when ESC was designed to
> indicate the start of a command sequence (which is why FilePro
> uses ESC-ESC to save.

I map screen(1) to use F1-F12 for switching screens 0-9 and creating one
of two different kind of screen sessions on the last two.  So those keys
aren't actually available to me when I use screen.  However, if I'm logged
into a system where I need them, I'll actually quote the ^[ to the system
and finish off the sequence.  Sad that one gets to remembering what they
actually are after a while.  :-/

Ever get the feeling some of these standards weren't so much designed as
just settled upon for lack of any better idea?  Don't start me on the
whole ^H vs ^? argument--especially not ^? for INTR on SCO. :) They got
erase right, but whose bright idea was a setting of ^? for INTR?!  It
should be ^C, the way God intended. :) Then there was DEC's whacked xterm
keyboard with the shift and control reversed, I think it was.  Oh, they
were -horrible- to type on.  I'd rather listen to the shrill beep of a
native vi200 terminal all day long than use one of those old Digital
xterms' official keyboards.  Yes, vi200, as in visual, not vt200.  No typo.
If you've ever used one, you know the blaring fire alarm type beep I'm
talking about suffering, here.  :)

mark->