The very first text editor 3654

Not might.

Yes.

No. What is generally good for efficiency can be used (or rather not-used) by the coders. Coders are abominably slow; anything that can speed up their data entry increases their code output. Now, if an editor keeps an editing pro from automatically inserting data, how much do you think that mere coders will be slowed? If coders spend any time wrestling with the system or its tools, you lose productivity. PERIOD.

This is all bells and whistles.

Go find somebody who knows how to do this work. Then, listen.

Data entry is not all mindlessly entering ASCII text. That is supposed to happen without any thinking because there is other thinking that has to be done. You are biased because you think that secretaries and data enterers, etc. were mindless robotic enbreasties. The secretaries were the backbone in DEC (in the olden days). Find all of Charlie's stories about his data entry pool. Find Hawk's stories about his secretaries. If you need more instruction, read any of the mystery stories by Emma Latham. Pay close attention to the character Miss Corsica.

Exactly. These people prefer to fine tune widgets rather than make new crude clunkers. It a human nature type of thing. The only reason JMF wrote code was so he could debug. Think about that. You don't want your best and brightest working on new EMACS screwing; you want them to work on tooling new OS features...and buttpects.

We were DEC; we did not know how to deal with data gobs. IBM did. I spent tons of my time keeping JMF and CDO honest when they worked on DEC's first TPS architectural spec. The data entry gal was name Poor Sally. She was poor mostly because bit gods had no idea how Poor Sally worked nor did they know about organizing torrential bit flows; this known in the computing biz as data bases.

hits using tools. I can't remember anybody swearing because they were using TECO and it wouldn't let them do what they wanted to.

You seem to be confusing editing with other tools needed for efficient production. Computing is not an all-in-one task.

BAH