4 ms·

My Pooh brain, especially today, goes into cognitive overload trying to keep track of an invisible point in a character based text editor. Line editors are muc

My Pooh brain, especially today, goes into cognitive overload trying to keep track of an invisible point in a character based text editor. Line editors are much less of a problem. In these I typically did not insert text in the middle of a line, I simply changed/substituted text in the middle of the line. This helps maintain context in contrast to moving a point around. Fortunately, my TECO exposure was mostly tempered through VTedit, a screen oriented macro set for TECO on the PDP. Couldn’t escape it completely, but it helped reduce the load in my challenged, tiny brain. By the time I moved to VMS, they had switched to EDT. Much more accessible.

ggm 2y ago
Yea, I walked into the SOS room day one of my degree and so learned SOS and Pascal instead of LISP and TECO. I do sometimes think I chose the wrong room. But your point about the point is well made, I think the DEC-10 TECO had a way to draw the current line and show where the point was, but it was very inferior to have to do it. Like chess wizards you're meant to carry an image of the code in your head at all times. I tried teco, couldn't entirely cope. SOS led naturally to ed in due course. I did learn emacs, But never really took to it. Now, I run my daily work log in org mode and do nothing else in it, but it is very good as a massively over-engineered multi-window table editor. Charles Forsyth (York) wrote a macro for ed which took the point, redrew the 24 line vt00 display to show the lines around it (12 above 11 below) and put you back where you were. He said it made ed as good as vi, and on the baudrate of the day who am I to disagree?
- whartung 2y ago
  On the Cyber running NOS, we had XEDIT. And similar to your story, I routinely dumped 10 lines of context after each change. Whatever that command was, was hard coded into muscle memory to the point it was mostly automatic. The other nice feature was that you could do quick in place edits from the command line. Combination of ed and sed. Another aspect that impacted TECO on the PDP was the concept of paging the file in. The machine was limited enough that you as a user were responsible for swapping parts of the buffer in and out, which, while usable, was not a good user experience. When loading a large file TECO/vtedit would prompt “loading file xxx.yyy slowly”. And it was. In the labs, my friend and I would commandeer multiple terminals, with one of them being our file loaded in the editor. We’d constantly write the file out, but never exit. And by “large file”, I’m talking a 35K byte source file. It was a different time, to be sure.
- kragen 2y ago
  if you mean unix ed, ed doesn't have macros. maybe it was ex?
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  One of the reasons TECO worked as it did is because baudrate limitations were unimaginable by today's standards. Text would appear character by character, so it would take a good few seconds to show 24(!) lines of code.
brucehoult 2y ago
> VTedit At Waikato university a student, Ivan Piacun, wrote "vted", also a set of macros for TECO, on the PDP-11/70. I would say it was what most people used until the switch to VAX. I tracked Ivan down on LinkedIn a few months ago. He says when he wrote "vted" he had absolutely no knowledge of other similar efforts, or of either emacs or vi, both of which existed (on the other side of the world) a couple of years earlier. Everyone worked in a silo in those days. You might eventually see something in BYTE (though it focussed on microcomputers) or Dr Dobbs (ditto) or Wireless World. Or something might make it ono a DECUS tape. But mostly you were just completely isolated if you lived on an island in the South Pacific Ocean, as we did. I was happy with EDT, never got to like TPU's "Eve", though I didn't use it for long because I graduated ... ... graduated to a company that used DG MV10000 with AOS/VS, which had an even worse clone of TECO called SPEED. There must have been a better editor, though I think still a line editor, but I have absolutely no memory of what it was called or how it worked!! I remember having to use SPEED for some things, but not most of the time. Maybe on very large files. I was writing programs in PL/I and also Postscript on that machine. I hooked the brand new Apple Laserwriter to the MV10000, something both DG and the Apple dealer said was impossible, and used it, at first, mostly to replace an HP pen plotter to make diagrams and graphs to physically paste into gaps left in hard copy "camera ready" output from an IBM DisplayWriter word processing system.
- ggm 2y ago
  EDT had rubber condom overlays for the Vt100 so you could know what numberpad key to use for magic edit, and the "gold" key which I thought was a superbad name for Meta.
  - markc 2y ago
    I still have my cherished VT125 EDT rubber overlay from when I worked at DEC '82-'85. Great editor. And the amazing thing was that there could be 50 people time-sharing on a single 1 MIPS Vax 780, and EDT was very responsive, virtually no lag.
- cafard 2y ago
  It seems to me that used SPEED in a complicated program + macro + dunno what to inspect system and error logs on AOS/VS. The full-screen editor was SED, which I remember as being a bit less odd than vi, but maybe because I encountered it first.

ggm 2y ago

Yea, I walked into the SOS room day one of my degree and so learned SOS and Pascal instead of LISP and TECO. I do sometimes think I chose the wrong room. But your point about the point is well made, I think the DEC-10 TECO had a way to draw the current line and show where the point was, but it was very inferior to have to do it. Like chess wizards you're meant to carry an image of the code in your head at all times. I tried teco, couldn't entirely cope. SOS led naturally to ed in due course. I did learn emacs, But never really took to it. Now, I run my daily work log in org mode and do nothing else in it, but it is very good as a massively over-engineered multi-window table editor. Charles Forsyth (York) wrote a macro for ed which took the point, redrew the 24 line vt00 display to show the lines around it (12 above 11 below) and put you back where you were. He said it made ed as good as vi, and on the baudrate of the day who am I to disagree?

whartung 2y ago
On the Cyber running NOS, we had XEDIT. And similar to your story, I routinely dumped 10 lines of context after each change. Whatever that command was, was hard coded into muscle memory to the point it was mostly automatic. The other nice feature was that you could do quick in place edits from the command line. Combination of ed and sed. Another aspect that impacted TECO on the PDP was the concept of paging the file in. The machine was limited enough that you as a user were responsible for swapping parts of the buffer in and out, which, while usable, was not a good user experience. When loading a large file TECO/vtedit would prompt “loading file xxx.yyy slowly”. And it was. In the labs, my friend and I would commandeer multiple terminals, with one of them being our file loaded in the editor. We’d constantly write the file out, but never exit. And by “large file”, I’m talking a 35K byte source file. It was a different time, to be sure.
kragen 2y ago
if you mean unix ed, ed doesn't have macros. maybe it was ex?
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
One of the reasons TECO worked as it did is because baudrate limitations were unimaginable by today's standards. Text would appear character by character, so it would take a good few seconds to show 24(!) lines of code.

brucehoult 2y ago

> VTedit At Waikato university a student, Ivan Piacun, wrote "vted", also a set of macros for TECO, on the PDP-11/70. I would say it was what most people used until the switch to VAX. I tracked Ivan down on LinkedIn a few months ago. He says when he wrote "vted" he had absolutely no knowledge of other similar efforts, or of either emacs or vi, both of which existed (on the other side of the world) a couple of years earlier. Everyone worked in a silo in those days. You might eventually see something in BYTE (though it focussed on microcomputers) or Dr Dobbs (ditto) or Wireless World. Or something might make it ono a DECUS tape. But mostly you were just completely isolated if you lived on an island in the South Pacific Ocean, as we did. I was happy with EDT, never got to like TPU's "Eve", though I didn't use it for long because I graduated ... ... graduated to a company that used DG MV10000 with AOS/VS, which had an even worse clone of TECO called SPEED. There must have been a better editor, though I think still a line editor, but I have absolutely no memory of what it was called or how it worked!! I remember having to use SPEED for some things, but not most of the time. Maybe on very large files. I was writing programs in PL/I and also Postscript on that machine. I hooked the brand new Apple Laserwriter to the MV10000, something both DG and the Apple dealer said was impossible, and used it, at first, mostly to replace an HP pen plotter to make diagrams and graphs to physically paste into gaps left in hard copy "camera ready" output from an IBM DisplayWriter word processing system.

ggm 2y ago
EDT had rubber condom overlays for the Vt100 so you could know what numberpad key to use for magic edit, and the "gold" key which I thought was a superbad name for Meta.
- markc 2y ago
  I still have my cherished VT125 EDT rubber overlay from when I worked at DEC '82-'85. Great editor. And the amazing thing was that there could be 50 people time-sharing on a single 1 MIPS Vax 780, and EDT was very responsive, virtually no lag.
cafard 2y ago
It seems to me that used SPEED in a complicated program + macro + dunno what to inspect system and error logs on AOS/VS. The full-screen editor was SED, which I remember as being a bit less odd than vi, but maybe because I encountered it first.