creat 1203
snip stories ... Perhaps you can, but I've never seen one instance of a programmer breaking code because spaces (rather...
There were two flavours of screen oriented editing in DEC Teco - VTEDIT and split screen mode "m,7:w$$" creates a scrolling region m lines deep on the bottom of your screen. The rest of the screen would show the damage you were doing to your file.
VTEDIT is a giant Teco 1 macro. It normally operated in screen mode, but you could always snap out of it to do something hairy. It was rather emacs like in that respect. It was a complete resource hog and would drag a respectable Vax to its knees. I got bored with it, even though it was and is the best screen editor on the planet. I'd rather use teco in split screen mode any day.
Teco is great for debugging a procedure starting with nothing but a *.
Where did the 8-column tab come from? 8 column tabs are not a secretarial or publishing standard. The norm for written text seems to be 4 'n' spaces, as was old-style secretary written...
AsBAH was saying, it gets stuff done with minimum keystrokes. Not many people these days see anything wrong with blithering with arrow keys or waving a mouse about when you are supposed to be editing.
It is rather good for people who can't type but can think.
Teco's screen redraw is a joy to behold. It does not matter with today's networks, but the other day I had to edit some stuff on a VMS box remotely connected via a GSM dial-up at a flaky 9600 bits-sec to my Powerbook. Teco knows all about a vt100's split scroll and emits the magic minimum characters to redraw a character cell screen. On the GSM link it was once again slow enough to enjoy.
jmfbahciv) writes: I was waiting for someone to mention that. Still, one ought to be able to indent three or four levels and have enough room left on the right-hand side for comments...
1. I have VTEDIT at macro vtedit.tec, its commented version vtedit.tes and instructions for using it in a plain text file called vtedit.doc It is just parked there. Oh how I wish I was bright enough to have written it. and some DEC teco docs at There you will find the v40 Teco manual converted to html and some links to the original from which it was created, as well as versions in Winhelp and rtf format.
-- I thought I would be the last on earth to mung my e-mail address. fsnospam$elliott$$