10 ms·

An Introduction to the EMACS Editor (1978)

154 points by lispm 8y ago

pulsarpietro 8y ago
Fantastic, I wish I were born those times.
- ggm 8y ago
  The impact of the gnu manifesto was pretty big. We talked about it, wondered when he'd get a compiler better than the PCC. I think we (leeds uni, 1980s) said years off but actually gcc 0.9? Came out far faster than I expected. Roll forward 10-15 years. Former compiler writers out of work. Gcc and llvm killed the market. On the other hand we have really good competing duopoly of compilers and lots of upper language support and diverse languages. So.. win some lose some. And it's not like rust and go and Java have to use llvm and gcc. Rust does. Go doesn't always.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. Intel's icc often produces slightly faster code than GCC. And a little back in time, SGI's MIPSPro compilers were extremely good. I'm sure there are a couple more contemporary compilers out there but the IBM and Intel compilers are something we use at work, at least.
    - frutiger 8y ago
      > Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. We have a few AIX machines and I’ve never heard anyone refer to xlC as a good compiler. It’s an aging compiler with idiosyncratic linker flags/behaviour and no support for modern standards.
      - Tor3 8y ago
        I have no idea what you mean by 'no support for modern standards'. It's a modern compiler for modern C (and the newest versions are compatible with code written for modern gcc, with a flag). The only thing about it is it has its own syntax for flags, which aren't exactly difficult, and they're well documented. It produces better code than gcc in many cases. Which is exactly what you would expect for a compiler written specifically for IBM by IBM. Lots of fine-tuning options for the Power architectures. You say you have a few AIX machines - which one, and which OS version, and which compiler versions? I'm on Power7 and Power8, with AIX 7.1 Don't look at AIX 4/5.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Lets not forget that GCC was largely ignored until UNIX vendors, starting with Sun, decided to split UNIX into user and developer editions. As for killing the market, there are still plenty of commercial compilers around, specially when one looks beyond the PC market.
    - ggm 8y ago
      Whitesmiths, pyramid and at least one other exited in the 1990s. I think what we're seeing is a more recent resurgence.
- red75prime 8y ago
  I were, unfortunately at 3 years old I wasn't interested in computers much, and I didn't have the means to get MIT papers (or any recent papers, or the knowledge that such papers exist for that matter) even when I developed interest in computers. But, yeah, being born in right time and place would be wonderful.
gnat 8y ago
"Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS, and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. Henot only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally, one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an "RMS" chiseled somewhere on them."
- gnulinux 8y ago
  I think RMS is an old school, a true hacker. Most things happening in tech industry today, if you go deep down, there is an RMS chiseled somewhere on something. I wish we could have him in HN, he's a very interesting person.
  - oblio 8y ago
    There must be some HN email client somewhere :)
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      https://melpa.org/#/hackernews https://melpa.org/#/hackernews
xte 8y ago
Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort. The bad part IMO is the dichotomy between "younger" and "older" users, the former would benefit a lot from many "semi-forgotten techs" but the letter need to modernize and explain things a bit or at least advertise with proper demos. In Emacs world many things happen in this direction with newly precooked configs, new packages etc, same happen in shell land with zsh/fish and the recent "epidemic" new tool set that mostly add sugar to classic unix utilities, that's good but we need more and more. I dream a GuixSD with Emacs as a login shell on terminal and as default desktop with EXWM and a good looking default theme, a small org-based intro vitutor style at first startup, perhaps with few video demo and many, many more users may be enlightened :-)
- rauhl 8y ago
  > Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. You’re right, but the way I like to put it is: I often use text rather than moving a mouse & clicking for the same reason that human beings often use speech rather than pointing & grunting (indeed, using a mouse is a lot like pointing & grunting at one’s computer). Using a smartphone & tablet really drive home how powerful it is to have a full-featured input device (i.e., a real keyboard), rather than just a mouse-driven UI.
  - xte 8y ago
    Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison :D thanks! On power I often leave some new colleagues astonished when they see how quick I am with Emacs vs with their "modern" solutions :-)
    - dotancohen 8y ago
      Wait until they see VIM!
ggm 8y ago
Dec teco manual in my shelf.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  like this one or larger ? http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-10-UTECA-A-D%20decsystem10%20Introduction%20To%20TECO%20(Text%20Editor%20And%20Corrector).pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/D...
  - ggm 8y ago
    Looks like it's that one. I used the BSD teco port with it to re familiarize myself with the thing. Last used it on tops10 in the 1979 timeframe
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Cool. I never thought of TECO as a product with a manual ..
      - ggm 8y ago
        As a George, my name did some g(lobal) operation. It was an editor more talked about than used. SOS linemode edit on tops 10 was just simpler on a decwriter or vt52. I do recall teco being quite like ed: you really have to be comfortable with an amount of text carried in your head. So..it's an editor for people with a coherent mental model. I was more incoherent.
        agumonkey 8y ago
        Oh I love that side of ed. It helps my mind stay focused somehow.
        ggm 8y ago
        Charles Forsthy at York had a macro or code hack to do .-12,.+12p-12p so you got a screen repaint about the current line. Tecos current mark thing was pretty good actually.
throwaway487550 8y ago
Nowadays it cannot even be fully comprehend how places like MIT, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Park research and, of course, Bell labs were islands of intelligence and sanity compared to the modern day's ocean of screaming bullshit. ''Dark liquid with negative mass'' sort of papers is what it all came to.
- enriquto 8y ago
  what are you talking about?
  - throwaway487550 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs among other things. These were places where old-school (with classical understanding, if we follow Robert M. Pirsig) people tried to reduce grounded in reality concepts to optimal (as humanly possible) implementations, as opposed to the modern tendency to pile up more and more crap.
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  MIT, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Park research and Bell labs had 1978 their share of bullshit too. But today they are normally forgotten because survivorship bias let's us only remember the successful stuff, which BTW would include the bullshit if it were so successfully bad that it became memorable.
  - throwaway487550 8y ago
    No. They never produced anything even vaguely similar to J2EE, NodeJS or PHP. Old School things, like ML, MIT Scheme, T3 Scheme, Common Lisps and Haskell are unattainable to modern narcissistic idiots.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      is it born in the wrong generation or can't stand what the new generation is doing
gumby 8y ago
If you missed it, the tiny section on ITS has some gems: When you connected to one of the ITs machines (even over the net) and wanted to log in, ECC suggests checking to see if anyone is logged in with the name you wanted and if not, login in with that name. Not create an account. “Logging in” in those days mainly set your home directory. No accounts, no passwords The command interpreter (shell in modern parlance) was the debugger, DDT. If any program crashed you could debug in in situ rather (with all connections open, files open etc) rather than sifting through a core dump. It’s ass if /bin/sh was gdb. Those were great days in a more civilised age. You can see here where the mutability of the Lisp Machines came from.
- bmgg 8y ago
  Such environments are great. I sometime wonder though if they lead to a style of programming that can only be understood if one practically lives inside the environment. That is essentially also Linus' argument against debuggers.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Common Lisp/Interlisp-D/Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Oberon, Xerox XDE, Xerox Mesa/Cedar, Dylan, Hypercard, Inferno/Limbo. Java and .NET IDEs environments as approximation of the former, yes. Linux kernel, not really.
    - scroot 8y ago
      We need to come up with a name for this "branch" of computing that is less followed and that has not been adopted en masse by the wider culture. It's going to have a second wind soon.
      - oblio 8y ago
        Well, the benefit of these machines manifests itself only for developers, especially for system programmers. Those are a tiny minority of computer users out there. So I'm not sure about this second coming :)
nickcw 8y ago
It is fun comparing the key sequences to a modern emacs. I looked through the section for "Basic Buffer Editing Info" and every one of the key commands mentioned there would work in a modern emacs! You can now use fancy cursor keys rather than CTRL-P, CTRL-N but if an emacs user from 1978 was stuck in front of an emacs today then they could get straight to work :-) The meta keys look a bit different though. You type two alt-modes (whatever they are) to get into the mini-buffer and then enter "MM-commands". In modern emacs you type Meta-x (Alt-x on most keyboards) to get into the same mode.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  This is one of the reasons I prefer using old, established, principled FLOSS software as opposed to Enterprise software. I don't have to change my habits because a middle manager decided to change the product to get a promotion.
- gumby 8y ago
  Before m-x commands you'd type a couple of altmodes to type raw TECO for Emacs to execute (like typing a string of ed commands into vi when not in insert mode). altmode was a special key on the TK TV displays we used. On an ASCII terminal the escape key would also send an altmode, which was printed as a dollar sign. I sometimes absentmindedly try to press meta-escape to do something in Emacs.
Isamu 8y ago
Memories of using TECO EMACS on the TOPS-20 systems at CMU. Anybody else here?
sudovancity 8y ago
Shoutout to my first CS teacher who pushed EMACS on my fellow students and me. It was a pain but I'm happy about it.
taeric 8y ago
Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was born. I know it is a very different beast than what I use today. Still amazing to see that some core ideas have managed to keep it ticking all of these years.
- Investogician 8y ago
  Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was -20 years old. :P
xrd 8y ago
There is a room mentioned in the document (p23): "NE43-829". Is this at MIT? It says a manual for Macsyma exists there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma "...one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems which is still widely used. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC." Is this a real room at MIT? Can someone at MIT check to see if the manual is still there? I'd like to borrow it.
- gumby 8y ago
  That was a room on the 8th floor of tech square (almost the entire 9th floor, the top of that building, was machine room). Tech square was an office complex built in anticipation of the space program. Then JFK was assassinated and LBJ moved mission control and all that stuff to Texas. NE43 was the name of 545 Main st. MIT had a bunch of floors, first 8&9, then 3 (CIA had the other half for a long time), then 7. I think Honeywell had an office there too, perhaps in one of the other buildings, because of the Multics project.

154 points by lispm 8y ago

pulsarpietro 8y ago

Fantastic, I wish I were born those times.

ggm 8y ago
The impact of the gnu manifesto was pretty big. We talked about it, wondered when he'd get a compiler better than the PCC. I think we (leeds uni, 1980s) said years off but actually gcc 0.9? Came out far faster than I expected. Roll forward 10-15 years. Former compiler writers out of work. Gcc and llvm killed the market. On the other hand we have really good competing duopoly of compilers and lots of upper language support and diverse languages. So.. win some lose some. And it's not like rust and go and Java have to use llvm and gcc. Rust does. Go doesn't always.
- Tor3 8y ago
  Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. Intel's icc often produces slightly faster code than GCC. And a little back in time, SGI's MIPSPro compilers were extremely good. I'm sure there are a couple more contemporary compilers out there but the IBM and Intel compilers are something we use at work, at least.
  - frutiger 8y ago
    > Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. We have a few AIX machines and I’ve never heard anyone refer to xlC as a good compiler. It’s an aging compiler with idiosyncratic linker flags/behaviour and no support for modern standards.
    - Tor3 8y ago
      I have no idea what you mean by 'no support for modern standards'. It's a modern compiler for modern C (and the newest versions are compatible with code written for modern gcc, with a flag). The only thing about it is it has its own syntax for flags, which aren't exactly difficult, and they're well documented. It produces better code than gcc in many cases. Which is exactly what you would expect for a compiler written specifically for IBM by IBM. Lots of fine-tuning options for the Power architectures. You say you have a few AIX machines - which one, and which OS version, and which compiler versions? I'm on Power7 and Power8, with AIX 7.1 Don't look at AIX 4/5.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Lets not forget that GCC was largely ignored until UNIX vendors, starting with Sun, decided to split UNIX into user and developer editions. As for killing the market, there are still plenty of commercial compilers around, specially when one looks beyond the PC market.
  - ggm 8y ago
    Whitesmiths, pyramid and at least one other exited in the 1990s. I think what we're seeing is a more recent resurgence.
red75prime 8y ago
I were, unfortunately at 3 years old I wasn't interested in computers much, and I didn't have the means to get MIT papers (or any recent papers, or the knowledge that such papers exist for that matter) even when I developed interest in computers. But, yeah, being born in right time and place would be wonderful.

gnat 8y ago

"Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS, and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. Henot only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally, one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an "RMS" chiseled somewhere on them."

gnulinux 8y ago
I think RMS is an old school, a true hacker. Most things happening in tech industry today, if you go deep down, there is an RMS chiseled somewhere on something. I wish we could have him in HN, he's a very interesting person.
- oblio 8y ago
  There must be some HN email client somewhere :)
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    https://melpa.org/#/hackernews https://melpa.org/#/hackernews

xte 8y ago

Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. Many of that trick does not have a purpose anymore but many still have, and not only for terminal usage but also for speed and comfort. The bad part IMO is the dichotomy between "younger" and "older" users, the former would benefit a lot from many "semi-forgotten techs" but the letter need to modernize and explain things a bit or at least advertise with proper demos. In Emacs world many things happen in this direction with newly precooked configs, new packages etc, same happen in shell land with zsh/fish and the recent "epidemic" new tool set that mostly add sugar to classic unix utilities, that's good but we need more and more. I dream a GuixSD with Emacs as a login shell on terminal and as default desktop with EXWM and a good looking default theme, a small org-based intro vitutor style at first startup, perhaps with few video demo and many, many more users may be enlightened :-)

rauhl 8y ago
> Sometimes new IT users do not comprehend why many things exists to navigate through text since they are born in mouse/X graphics era. You’re right, but the way I like to put it is: I often use text rather than moving a mouse & clicking for the same reason that human beings often use speech rather than pointing & grunting (indeed, using a mouse is a lot like pointing & grunting at one’s computer). Using a smartphone & tablet really drive home how powerful it is to have a full-featured input device (i.e., a real keyboard), rather than just a mouse-driven UI.
- xte 8y ago
  Oh, I will steal (and credit of course) your "pointing & grunting" comparison :D thanks! On power I often leave some new colleagues astonished when they see how quick I am with Emacs vs with their "modern" solutions :-)
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Wait until they see VIM!

ggm 8y ago

Dec teco manual in my shelf.

agumonkey 8y ago
like this one or larger ? http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-10-UTECA-A-D%20decsystem10%20Introduction%20To%20TECO%20(Text%20Editor%20And%20Corrector).pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/D...
- ggm 8y ago
  Looks like it's that one. I used the BSD teco port with it to re familiarize myself with the thing. Last used it on tops10 in the 1979 timeframe
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Cool. I never thought of TECO as a product with a manual ..
    - ggm 8y ago
      As a George, my name did some g(lobal) operation. It was an editor more talked about than used. SOS linemode edit on tops 10 was just simpler on a decwriter or vt52. I do recall teco being quite like ed: you really have to be comfortable with an amount of text carried in your head. So..it's an editor for people with a coherent mental model. I was more incoherent.
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        Oh I love that side of ed. It helps my mind stay focused somehow.
        ggm 8y ago
        Charles Forsthy at York had a macro or code hack to do .-12,.+12p-12p so you got a screen repaint about the current line. Tecos current mark thing was pretty good actually.

throwaway487550 8y ago

Nowadays it cannot even be fully comprehend how places like MIT, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Park research and, of course, Bell labs were islands of intelligence and sanity compared to the modern day's ocean of screaming bullshit. ''Dark liquid with negative mass'' sort of papers is what it all came to.

enriquto 8y ago
what are you talking about?
- throwaway487550 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs among other things. These were places where old-school (with classical understanding, if we follow Robert M. Pirsig) people tried to reduce grounded in reality concepts to optimal (as humanly possible) implementations, as opposed to the modern tendency to pile up more and more crap.
PurpleRamen 8y ago
MIT, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Park research and Bell labs had 1978 their share of bullshit too. But today they are normally forgotten because survivorship bias let's us only remember the successful stuff, which BTW would include the bullshit if it were so successfully bad that it became memorable.
- throwaway487550 8y ago
  No. They never produced anything even vaguely similar to J2EE, NodeJS or PHP. Old School things, like ML, MIT Scheme, T3 Scheme, Common Lisps and Haskell are unattainable to modern narcissistic idiots.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    is it born in the wrong generation or can't stand what the new generation is doing

gumby 8y ago

If you missed it, the tiny section on ITS has some gems: When you connected to one of the ITs machines (even over the net) and wanted to log in, ECC suggests checking to see if anyone is logged in with the name you wanted and if not, login in with that name. Not create an account. “Logging in” in those days mainly set your home directory. No accounts, no passwords The command interpreter (shell in modern parlance) was the debugger, DDT. If any program crashed you could debug in in situ rather (with all connections open, files open etc) rather than sifting through a core dump. It’s ass if /bin/sh was gdb. Those were great days in a more civilised age. You can see here where the mutability of the Lisp Machines came from.

bmgg 8y ago
Such environments are great. I sometime wonder though if they lead to a style of programming that can only be understood if one practically lives inside the environment. That is essentially also Linus' argument against debuggers.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Common Lisp/Interlisp-D/Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Oberon, Xerox XDE, Xerox Mesa/Cedar, Dylan, Hypercard, Inferno/Limbo. Java and .NET IDEs environments as approximation of the former, yes. Linux kernel, not really.
  - scroot 8y ago
    We need to come up with a name for this "branch" of computing that is less followed and that has not been adopted en masse by the wider culture. It's going to have a second wind soon.
    - oblio 8y ago
      Well, the benefit of these machines manifests itself only for developers, especially for system programmers. Those are a tiny minority of computer users out there. So I'm not sure about this second coming :)

nickcw 8y ago

It is fun comparing the key sequences to a modern emacs. I looked through the section for "Basic Buffer Editing Info" and every one of the key commands mentioned there would work in a modern emacs! You can now use fancy cursor keys rather than CTRL-P, CTRL-N but if an emacs user from 1978 was stuck in front of an emacs today then they could get straight to work :-) The meta keys look a bit different though. You type two alt-modes (whatever they are) to get into the mini-buffer and then enter "MM-commands". In modern emacs you type Meta-x (Alt-x on most keyboards) to get into the same mode.

gnulinux 8y ago
This is one of the reasons I prefer using old, established, principled FLOSS software as opposed to Enterprise software. I don't have to change my habits because a middle manager decided to change the product to get a promotion.
gumby 8y ago
Before m-x commands you'd type a couple of altmodes to type raw TECO for Emacs to execute (like typing a string of ed commands into vi when not in insert mode). altmode was a special key on the TK TV displays we used. On an ASCII terminal the escape key would also send an altmode, which was printed as a dollar sign. I sometimes absentmindedly try to press meta-escape to do something in Emacs.

Isamu 8y ago

Memories of using TECO EMACS on the TOPS-20 systems at CMU. Anybody else here?

sudovancity 8y ago

Shoutout to my first CS teacher who pushed EMACS on my fellow students and me. It was a pain but I'm happy about it.

taeric 8y ago

Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was born. I know it is a very different beast than what I use today. Still amazing to see that some core ideas have managed to keep it ticking all of these years.

Investogician 8y ago
Funny to see that an introduction to my favorite editor... from the year I was -20 years old. :P

xrd 8y ago

There is a room mentioned in the document (p23): "NE43-829". Is this at MIT? It says a manual for Macsyma exists there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma "...one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems which is still widely used. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC." Is this a real room at MIT? Can someone at MIT check to see if the manual is still there? I'd like to borrow it.

gumby 8y ago
That was a room on the 8th floor of tech square (almost the entire 9th floor, the top of that building, was machine room). Tech square was an office complex built in anticipation of the space program. Then JFK was assassinated and LBJ moved mission control and all that stuff to Texas. NE43 was the name of 545 Main st. MIT had a bunch of floors, first 8&9, then 3 (CIA had the other half for a long time), then 7. I think Honeywell had an office there too, perhaps in one of the other buildings, because of the Multics project.