creat 1187
The problem I had was that I started thinking about the video TECOs that drew everything...
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...
That is the one thing that annoys me most about the non-TECO-based, non-36-bit Emacsen. On the original, the HELP character is ^, and ^H is a cursor-motion command like ^B. I guess when RMS moved from his roots he just couldn't stand the non-mnemonic nature of ^.
Part of this came about via the Lisp machines: These had Emacs-like editors written in Lisp--but since Lisp was the shell-exec-monitor-mode process as well as the runtime system for user programs, there wasn't any dissonance. GNU Emacs is a follow-on to this for stock hardware; had it been directly done from the TECO version, I have no doubt some of the annoyances would have differed.
following moved here for continuity of thought
This is also an historical artifact: On ITS, where EMACS originated, ^C was not the program interrupt character, ^Z was. That left ^C usable as a prefix Control and Meta keys (bits 200 and 400 on a 9-bit character). One of the differences between ITS EMACS and TENEX-Tops-20 EMACS is the interchange of the ^C and ^Z buttignments.
snip I was thinking of editing text in general rather than just code, so "copyediting" means correcting grammar-spelling-usage-etc. Possibly irrelevant. We can rule out that possibility -- this was...
When GNU Emacs was created, RMS used the ITS keymap for ^C, so typing as many ^C's as you want will never get you out of Emacs. ^Z should have, if you had thought of it--although it seems to be common in Tops-10, it may not be in VMS. (Unix would understand it, though.)
And no, Microsoft OSes did not support text terminal login in 1989.
-- Rich Alderson "ASCII ribbon "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." x HTML mail and --rest, of the Endless postings