4 ms·
TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from
by fsckboy 7y ago
TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end of line" or "n lines back/forward from cursor"
TECO commands were typed in as code, essentially, and that code could also be saved and run as macros.
it was extremely powerful, such that emacs was originally written as TECO Edit MACros.
- wnoise 7y agoAh! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to with the q command.
- jolmg 7y agoI wonder if they're supposed to be "q(uick) registers". EDIT: Maybe not: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12081/why-were-teco-variables-called-q-registers https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12081/why...
- bch 7y agoI was confused by the ‘q’ command in vi, so I did quick testing (in nvi(1)) and scanned vim cheat sheets. I still don’t know what ‘q’ does in the named buffer context - help?
- okal 7y agoRecording macros, I think.
- bch 7y agoLooks like you’re correct![0] In nvi, I just key my commands on a scratch line (testing occasionally), then: “xyy to load the whole line (yy) into buffer ‘x’ (“x). Execution (@x) thereafter looks ~same. [0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros