6 Feb
2021
6 Feb
'21
11:47 p.m.
Yep. The problem with keypunches and teletypes is that they had a
limit to how fast you could type on them and you could easily outtype
them. The key to being efficient on them was to get into the rhythm of
the maximum speed the machine could accept.
My first terminal I got to use was actually an ADM1. It had the same
arrow keys printed on HJKL as the ADM3. The H and J made sense
(backspace and linefeed for left and down). The others were just
convenient as they were physically adjacent.
To this day, it galls me that emacs uses ^H for help. It's the first
thing I change when I install it.
By the time vi rolled around I had already learned one of the emacs
variants (after a brief stint with a Rand-editor flavored thing called
INed). To this day I don't really have much facility in vi. It used
to freakout my coworkers no end that if there was no emacs on the
machine, I'd just blast through everything using ed. Nice thing about
doing a lot of work in ed: you get very good at regular expressions.
------ Original Message ------
From: "Mary Ann Horton" <mah(a)mhorton.net>
To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: 2/6/2021 12:33:53 PM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Typing tutors
At Berkeley, everybody was already a touch typist.
That's why vi
commands emphasize lower case letters, especially hjkl which are right
under the home position. The original reason for hjkl was the ADM3A,
but when I added arrow key support to vi and disabled the hardcoded
hjkl, a line of grad students made me put it back.