creat 1185
In other words, with the in-person-from-a-human equivalent of "spend half an hour with the tutorial and take notes"?
"The page"? Probably something I'm not getting here.
Not sure what you mean by this last comment, if you mean to contrast TECO with other editors. "Think in characters"?
So, that's the 3x5 card for doing simple things with TECO? Okay. (Don't you also need commands to move around in the file, or do you normally do that with the search commands?)
Anyway this certainly seems not too tough. (I'm curious now about why I had such trouble that one time I fell into teco on a Unix system. Well, the details are long gone from my memory .... )
The emacs 3x5 card for simple editing might be something like this. (If I've left something out maybe an emacs expert will correct me.)
The problem I had was that I started thinking about the video TECOs that drew everything in core. In these cases, the N...
^x^s to save ^x^c to exit ^n, ^p, ^f, ^b to move the cursor around ^d to delete a character ^s to search Just type text to insert at current cursor position.
^g to bail out if you invoke some unwanted command inadvertently.
snip Got it. Thanks. snip Well, my point was that I didn't understand what you meant by "think in characters", nothing about whether it was a good idea. I'm happy to agree that too much...
There are a few other commands that would be very helpful to know (page up, page down, start of line, end of line, line kill), but I *think* the above would be enough to do simple editing. It should all fit on a 3x5 card, and I'd think that after a few hours' use a person wouldn't need to reference the card much if at all.
(Remind me -- have you tried emacs? Just curious.)
Are you sure you mean "line editors" here? TECO is what I would call a line editor. If you meant what I think of as "screen editors" -- hm, maybe, there's some point you're making about "everything is characters" that I'm not getting.
It's interesting, though, that training the not-so-technical was easier with TECO, which in the current conventional-wisdom view is not very user-friendly (no menus! no mouse! ack pfui ....).
Not having used SOS (that I can remember anyway), I can't say what it might have done, but .... If I'm understanding your description right, to insert text with TECO you did have to type a "T" or "I" first? which is similar to what you'd do in vi, the other editor I know well. And in emacs you don't type *anything* to indicate that you want to insert characters. Now, to move around and stuff, all those control-something sequences .... It's one of the reasons I like vi better. Can you give an example of an editor that makes you waste a lot of keystrokes telling it you want to insert characters?
When I worked in Tape Prep we did that kind of editing, too. A file is a file is a file. We didn't care what the guy or gal who submitted the request did with...
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.