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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!cs.city.ac.uk!usenet From: njw@cs.city.ac.uk (Nick Williams) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.apps Subject: Re: ANDREW for FreeBSD? (AUIS-6.3/*BSD) Date: 22 Jun 1994 07:14:26 GMT Organization: Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University Lines: 50 Message-ID: <NJW.94Jun22081426@wilma.cs.city.ac.uk> References: <772108026.AA07182@f74.n700.z6.ftn.air.org> <F7WPB0ZC@math.fu-berlin.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: wilma.cs.city.ac.uk In-reply-to: gusw@zedat.fu-berlin.de's message of Tue, 21 Jun 1994 17:38:37 GMT In article <F7WPB0ZC@math.fu-berlin.de> gusw@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Gunther Shadow) writes: > I have partly followed your discussion here but with some different > interrest in it: In search for a kind of a free WYSIWYG textprocessor > I was told about InterViews `doc' and about some ANDREW editor. I > built the interviews stuff and it looks nice, but the performance is > so bad that it's nearly unusable. I built the andrew stuff more than a > year ago too, and my first impression of the editor was that it is not > much more than xedit. Has this changed until now? Do you think that > it's worthwhile to give Andrew another try? Would you refer to it as > `a kind of a WYSIWYG textprocessor'? I would say your view of the editor was slightly off. From my experience of using 4 years ago, it is definitely more than xedit and much closer to a WYSIWYG emacs. Ez (the editor) provides *full* WYSIWYG editing, assuming you don't mind the fact that you don't see pagebreaks and that you can resize the window whilst you can't resize the printed page. Other than that, what you see really is what you get. It has many different "plug-in" modes, for editing code, (like C, C++, modula2, HTML, etc). Drawbacks: - it does not provide an UNDO facility. This is the major biggy, the one of direct relevance in comparing the editor to Emacs functionality. - it's large (30M source only) - You need ditroff or groff to print (at the moment) Advantages: + it really is WYSIWYG (or as close as you get without having a DTP package). + it provides support for different "media" objects to be embedded in documents, e.g. spreadsheets, graphs, animations... + very extensible (due to architecture) + "officially" supported by the Andrew Consortium + international (allows "complex" characters to be edited, allows menus etc to be redefined based on "language"). + has a really nice (albeit slow) mail interface :-) There you go. A quick summary. Look at comp.soft-sys.andrew for more info... -- Nick Williams, Systems Architecture Research Centre, City University, London, EC1V 0HB. UK. Web: http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/finger?njw E-mail: njw@cs.city.ac.uk (MIME and ATK) Work Telephone: +44 71 477 8551 Work Fax: +44 71 477 8587