On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 5:52 PM Peter Boy <pboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Am 23.07.2022 um 21:24 schrieb George N. White III <gnwiii@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 7:34 PM Joe Zeff <joe@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> It's not an editor war, at least from my POV. I'm only trying to get
> some of the other people here understand that there isn't One True
> Editor, and that people writing walkthroughs/HOWTOs should do so in an
> editor-agnostic fashion.
>
> In user forums there has been an increase in the number of (often hard to
> analyze) problems that end up being caused by overly helpful editors that
> replace ASCII characters with unicode glyphs (different space characters,
> opening/closing quotes, different dash/minus) in configuration files. Some
> advice on the choice of editor and ways to detect non-ASCII characters
> could avoid this class of problems.
Yes, thanks. I hadn't even thought of that in terms of our documentation. It’s an
important fact we should explain.
It could be useful to provide a "Know your editor" document explaining some of the
issues and workarounds/solutions. Choice of fonts should be mentioned: use a font
where 1 (one), l (lower case L), O (capital o), and 0 (zero) look different.
Until now I think it’s only GUI editors that do that. What about text console editors?
I know, vim, nano, and (hopefully) emacs don’t do that. Is there a list of potential
problematic editors?
In my field there are many macOS users using linux for the heavy lifting on
headless servers. Apple TextEdit is a big offender for mangling ASCII files.
There are many similar editors used outside N. America and Western Europewhose names I never recognize (I assume because they do have good support
for the user's native language). Many younger users started out on smart phones
at an early age and will go to great lengths to avoid using a terminal. In my
field, many users do linux hosted work in web browsers using Jupyter, Rstudio,
and the like, and will transfer ASCII files to their desktop to edit them even if they
are fixing a 1-letter typo.
Maybe users should be given choices depending on their familiarity with
regular expressions, terminals, POSIX shells, etc.
It should also be noted that many editors are available on multiple platforms, so
those who are required by enterprise policies to have Windows or macOS can
find text editors they can use on both linux and the platform required to receive
directives from on high..
George N. White III
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