The very first text editor 3648

You might try googling for "teco users guide dec-11-uteca" PDP-11 Teco User's Guide

Chapters 3-5 cover the basics of the DEC dialects of teco. Then get yourself a Vax or Alpha with VMS on it. There is no subsbreastute for trying it yourself.

The power came from terseness, consistency, and the practicality of macros that were easier to re-invent than to remember and type the name you gave to them. Many would be shorter than their file name if you did.

The basic parts of emacs, which was originally written in teco, have a similar flavour, but emacs is incredibly verbose and far too wysiwyg for a die-hard teco user.

q registers were like yank buffers with single character names. You would use them for storing macros too. A common use was to populate them with your favourite editing tricks from your teco startup file. You could execute q registers, and of course, in doing so they could call further macros in others.

I've been using teco for over 30 years. It is so embedded in my fingers that I'm having great trouble learning emacs now that I have turned off my last VMS box.

I can't find any other editor or word processor that comes anywhere near teco's sophistication, conciseness and simplicity.

(don't try to persuade me otherwise. I'll get emacs working as well for me one day, it is awfully good, just different enough to trick my fingers.)

I think both teco and emacs share a similar problem. You have to spend a long time with them before you can separate thinking about the editor's commands and thinking about the code you are writing. I bet Barb would call that "getting it into your fingers".