Baslinux mailing list

[3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org]

Day Brown wrote:
>
> First off, most of us compose text for this screen, 
> not to be printed on paper. 

When I compose for the screen (eg. email), I use a text
editor.  When I compose for paper, I use a word processor.  
Horses for courses.

> Second, if you have gone to the bother to actually learn 
> how to type, the gui mouse system sux. 

Why is that?  I know how to type and I see no difference
between the two.  Once you are on the line typing, it's
exactly the same.  The only difference is in one case (GUI) 
you use the mouse to select options, and in the other (wp51) 
you use drop-down menus or function keys to select options.  
Perhaps some people have learned to touch-type the wp51 
function keys (all 40 of them), but not me.

> Third, there are lots of people who are trying to write 
> novels, not office memos; and again, most text editors 
> suck when trying to deal with documents that long. 

Why do you say that?  If you write your novel in chapters
and save each chapter as a separate file, it works pretty
well.

> I have seen dos text mode tools that use color in a 
> systematic way. 

Linux, too, has text editors that use colors in a systemic 
way.  I use NEdit (on BL2) for most things (except email) 
and it shows control codes and tags in various colors 
(user definable).

> This *lack of functionality* is most obvious to those of us 
> who remember the BBS qwkmail newsgroups, in which, on my screen, 
> I set my words yellow, yours are green, if you quote a third
> person, then his are blue, and so on. 

I've got that right now (in Sylpheed).  My words are black, 
your words are dark green, and if you quote anybody else they 
are light green.  I could have chosen blue/green/yellow, but 
I like the shades of green.

> if you could produce a quoted document on the left side of
> your screen, and your annotated comments on the right. But 
> because you have a gui, you dont know how many lines will 
> be on the reader's screen, so you cant be sure the two 
> columns of text will line up 

Just choose a line length that will fit on everybody's screen 
and press ENTER before you reach the end of the line.

Cheers,
Steven