Carl, On Monday 06 February 2006 09:30, Carl Hartung wrote:
On Monday 06 February 2006 12:19, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
Joe can use the old cp/m familiar wordstar command set. It's like rediscovering an old friend. <grin>.
Wow! I wonder if those neurons still exist in my brain? I'm going to fire it up and try it today. Thanks, Patrick! - Carl
A brief anecdote: I was a dyed-in-the-wool Vi programmer working exclusively on Unix systems for many years when the Mac burst on the personal computer scene. As so many did, I became enamored of it and diverted my career for about 10 years to do Mac programming. During this time, I had no access to Vi and used only MPW, BBEdit and Mac-specific text editors and word processors. When in 1997 I got a job back in the Unix (and Windows) world, I went back to Vi (or Vim as the case now often was). I had some trepidation about this, fearing I'd forgotten all my Vi skills. But much to my surprise, they had not dulled at all! I could just sit down and blast away as skillfully as I had for many years back when Vi was the only editor I knew. Basal ganglia are a wonderful thing! But with the experience fresh in my mind of using MPW (a programmable programmers' editor and IDE of sorts), I thought I should try to learn Emacs, it being a highly customizable and programmable editor (and an IDE of sorts). Well, I just couldn't do it. When I tried to use a text-mode, non mouse-and-menus editor, all my Vi knowledge barred the door--I just could not make the switch to the Emacs commands. Not, at least, without taking a lot of time to do nothing but learn a new editor. So I gave up on that. Basal ganglia are a cursed thing! Oddly enough, I don't have any problems taking up new mouse-and-menus editors. So my guess is that you'll probably be able to resurrect your Wordstar editing skills quite quickly. Randall Schulz