The very first text editor 3650

oh, I didn't think I could leave the room. :-)

I think it's downright stupid if you want to do anything useful.

I was trying to remember my first TECO lesson. Other than the OS specifics of file specifications...I'll try to list the least number of commands you need to do an editing job with no fancy schmancy editing tricks.

D-delete next character K-kill all characters from pointer to end of line S-search for string within buffer page; don't advance to past FF N-search for string and advance past FFs T-type text from pointer to end of line.

All commands can be preceded by a + or - sign and a number. Default is +1.

Thus if the pointer was in the middle of a line, a 0TT would print from the beginning of the line to the end of the line. A -5TT would print the from 5 LFs back to end of the line my pointer is in.

All of the above commands D, S, N, T, K can take the same sign and numeric arguments.

Now, the rules would have been slightly different if you used a video TECO. It didn't honor the page differences. In olden times, the code would read in a full page, formfeed to formfeed, so that a S search wouldn't go on to the next page. This was nice when computing services were slow and you were editing huge files.

And, you know what? It's much easier to show you how it works that write it.

BAH