creat 1189
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I can't tell you. I'd have to "see" the whole file. Diags were a real PITA to edit because each code page was almost identical except for the entry point...
Interesting. Okay. It seems to me that with a screen-oriented editor you could still be sort...
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 definitely a text terminal, which I'm pretty sure wasn't nearly smart enough to run TECO on its own, connected to some server-probably-running-Unix. (The connection was wire-cable-something rather than a phone line, but I doubt that's really important.) Not a configuration one finds very often these days, but not atypical in 1989?
Yeah. I think we'll have to leave it at that.
However, there's now enough doubt in my mind about exactly what happened way back when that I may have to stop telling my little "this proves how awful TECO is!" story. This may be a good thing.
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What I was getting at is that it's tough to be consistent with multiple monitors-shells-whatever if they have incompatible customs. To Windows users, ^C is "copy" (as in "copy and paste"). To Unix users (at least in the old days), ^C is "break". So using ^C^C to mean "panic, bail out" is great for Unix but not so great for Windows.
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Hm. Well, perhaps the archetype of "non-technical user" I'm using as the basis for my comments is so steeped in GUI usage that he-she can't be taught to use something non-GUI without a lot of retraining.
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And you found that TECO helped in this regard? Hm. (I'd have thought that, whatever editor was being used, it would be more useful to save a pre-edit copy of whatever you were changing, and use some tool to compare that with the changed version -- "diff" in the Unix world.)
Okay, so what you're doing above is advancing to, what, the 5th occurrence of "O", after which you insert "doitnow"? I don't get how this means you need a lot of keystrokes to insert characters.
I don't know. The line editors I remember were -- well, if they were difficult to use, it was more because it was more difficult to keep track of where you were without being presented with a view of a screenful of text than because the commands involved a lot of keystrokes. This is confirmed with a quick trial of "ed" and "ex". Well, I guess maybe they did make it a little tough to insert text into the middle of a line. But that's what the "s" (subsbreastute) command is for ....
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.