On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 1:52 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) was interesting in a couple of ways. All of its commands were a single character. It was also programmable in a very powerful way. EMACS was first implemented as a set of TECO macros (the name EMACS is an acronym for Editor MACroS). -Paul W.

On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 2:29 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote: Thanks -- you're right. FINE was what we had on the PDP-10s, not pure EMACS, which we did not get until we started running TOPS-20. As I said, i used it for such a short time and never really mastered it but the time I switched to UNIX. Which set me on a path to ex/vi and by the time Gosling EMACS was available, I had never went back as ex/vi was getting the job done and ran on both PDP-11s and Vaxen. It was just not worth re-learning it as vi was by the, everywhere from MS-DOS to the Cray 1 and EMACS wasn't.

Paul Winalski writes: He was also kicked off ARPANET. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/pourne-smut.html

At 2025-07-20T11:43:10-0400, Paul Winalski wrote: The world needs a formula to compute the Reynolds number of an online discussion. :D Regards, Branden

From the DEC TECO manual: Mung - A recursive acronym for “Mung Until No Good”; an act applied by novice TECO users to their source files. Yup, I did that. -Mike Markowski On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 9:42 PM Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 09:59:54AM -0400, Chet Ramey via COFF wrote: So many smart people I know love emacs. I forced myself to live in it for a year, not the emacs vi mode stuff, just straigth emacs. I never got to the point that I liked it. I think it's the lisp aspect, if you don't love lisp, I don't think you'll love emacs. vi just works for me. And when I tried to get my kid to try emacs, his comment was "I've watched you in vi, it's magic, I want that". I do some simple stuff, here are the maps I use a lot: # :.,$ , !}fmt<CR> @ :1,. So I can be on a paragraph and hit "," and it is reformatted to fit in 80 columns. I can be anywhere and do "#d" and that deletes to the bottom, same thing "@d" and that deletes to the top. Apparently that is "magic" :-)

I love lisp, but emacs, not so much. I do a lot of different operating systems and I found vi to be much more consistent, but I’m not knocking emacs, just not my cup of tea. Will Sent from my iPhone

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 10:13 AM Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: ditto. You might have a hit on something here. I learn TECO and then, as Lars pointed out, FINE on the PDP-10s before I saw UNIX. At the same time, I had been introduced to LISP in our comparative languages course (I wrote a mancala game, and Alpha/Beta solved using it). But I was never a LISP hacker on the PDP-10s. We primarily used SAIL and BLISS, so I suspect that's why, when I finally had the chance to switch to UNIX and learned EX, I decided it was too much trouble. There were just too many commands and weird sequences to learn again; I wasn't as good with it, so I gave up. I also suspect that since >>UCB<< original version of ex/vi was ubiquitous (and had been ported to PCs and eventually TOPS-20 but my PDP-10/20 days were long gone). The fact was that Emacs was not in those days (yes, there were lots of flavors, but each was different for the pc's, but it was not on other UNIX systems for a while), so that may have tainted my thinking. But when it did show up, Gosling EMACS (which begat Gnu) != Zimmerman Emacs [similar to the nvi/cim war of today]. However, I suspect that if I had grown up in the Lisp world, the comfort of having that would have been a strong drive to want it everywhere. But without that, the (re)learning curve was just too high and I >>was<< comfortable. It got the job done. BTW, I feel the same way about troff and LaTeX. I gave up Scribe from the PDP-10s/20s when I went to UNIX. The tool I had was nroff/troff. I became very proficient with it - better than I had ever been with Scribe. Scribe became unobtainium and Tex became the standard in PDP-10 and VMS land. Then folks tried to import a lot of Scribe into Tex, creating Latex, but by the time I had access to it, it was just too different; it was not worth the effort.

On 7/21/25 11:00 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: I don't think it's that. I think it's simpler: you put the time in to master something -- or at least become familiar with it. Mastery breeds familiarity breeds comfort. Even if after the fact you try to `spend time' with another tool or editor, you're bucking the already-established comfort level you've obtained. I have a working knowledge of vi -- readline has vi key bindings, and POSIX specifies them -- but I wouldn't say I have a comfort level there. Just enough to get around. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

On 7/21/25 11:40 AM, Warner Losh wrote: I learned emacs first because I started on TOPS-20 first. Then when I moved to 4.2 BSD, emacs was there. There was no reason to learn vi then. Exactly. Everyone here is smart. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

On Mon, 21 Jul 2025, Chet Ramey via COFF wrote: I must be weird: I use VI, but EMACS key bindings in my shells. And I've never understood why EMACS doesn't end a file with a newline; I was forever cleaning up a former cow-orker's work. I guess it depends on whether you consider "\n" to be a line terminator (VI) or a line separator (EMACS). -- Dave, another Word*Star lover

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 11:00 AM Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: No worries. Maybe, but I've known a lot of smart people who stayed with ex/vi over Emacs. I never found Emacs any more intuitive than ex/vi - just a different learning curve. Since I came to UNIX from TSS and TOPS-10, I found that UNIX presented a steep learning curve. I was accustomed to having a programmable command system, editors, and specialized tools/programs to do specific things. Yes, the 10's had things like SUDS and ISPS, which we did not (yet) have in Unix land. And clearly, BLISS generated better code than C, so why would I give all that up? I was getting paid to program UNIX, so I learned to use it. The original value was that I was getting paid. But the idea of things like standard I/O, the pipeline, and >>small<< tools that I could reuse was intuitive. Yup, the command had strange names, but I learned to >>love<< find scripts and grep. I quickly discovered that, even on a small 11/40, I could accomplish a lot. I quickly became more effective than I was on the PDP-10 - the 10 forced every program to be its subsystem, and while what was there was excellent, I could not make it up -- i.e., I liked the tools approach way more than the give a man a fish approach. That said, given the capabilities I had in PDP-10 land, I still had an account on them to run SUDS when I needed to create a schematic as an example (CMU did not obtain UCDS for EE-CAD until my Senior year). FWIW: Ted Kowalski's PhD was in developing ISPS for UNIX, although by the time he finished, I had long since left. So the "special" tools that the PDP-10s had became less and less critical, but the >>value<< I received for learning UNIX was immense. I suspect that if I had been forced to use Emacs and found its value (like using m-lisp), like my UNIX investment, it might have been worth it. Indeed, many intelligent people I know share this view. But the key is I looked at what people did with Emacs and never thought, I want/need that feature. As I said, I was not a LISP person, so things like m-lisp were not valued. They liked it, but I could do everything they could that >>I desired<< to do. The mode/non-mode argument never bothered me before, so again, its value was not seen as necessary. Maybe - but (I think) it's a value proposition. If the cost is high and you don't see a return on investment. If it had been available, I might have even used it. We toyed with bringing RT-11 TECO from the Harvard tape up on our V6++ systems, but never did, as we were fluent with ed(1) and by then, fred(1) had shown up from Cornell [funny we did bring up the ddt as the early debuggers for V5 and V6v were weak and adb did not yet exist]. Amen, brother - I always want people smarter than me on the team, and I can say that I have been thrilled to have that occur with most of the major projects I have been a part of. Clem

On Mon, 21 Jul 2025, Paul Winalski wrote: Mine, I think (and I hadn't seen it before). -- Dave

I heard about RMS acquiring RSI of the left wrist, presumably from the ‘ctrl-x’ plus other keys. <http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html> 1. Is this a ’thing’ or blown out of proportion? 2. Since Function keys & they were programmable, I gather ‘gun’ emacs users don’t have the RSI problem. Is this correct? 3. I’ve never heard of people with RSI from using ‘vi’/‘vim’. Is this right? -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 5:30 PM David Arnold &lt;davida(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: I've know several RSI suffers that used vi. Several that used emacs. No good data, that I've seen, on which one is better or worse. I did have a conversation with my doctor that told me that hands between keyboard and mouse make it worse, but I don't know where he got that idea: just from his patience or some study. I know I do better with a real mouse and keeping my hands off it as much as possible. Warner