TECO Hunt

DATE: 2014-01-27

Sorry for the break in posts, but I was away from home on a business
trip last week without a decent telnet client.

I have been meaning to write about my TWENEX-inspired love affair with
FORTRAN, but I decided to write this post first.

This story starts on the DEC-10 system at Living Computer Museum where
I needed an editor to work on some FORTRAN source code, and it turned
out that of the choices available, TECO[1], the Mother of Hacker
Editors, was the one I knew the best thanks to a long ago interest in
the origins of Emacs and a TECO survival guide[2] that I created as an
SDF tutorial several years ago.

It was fun to brush-up my old (limited) TECO skills, but I wasn't
satisfied with mere "survival" skills and figured out how to use
wildcards in text searches and how to repeat a command over an entire
file.

Now I want to share this new-found magic with other TECO fans, but the
question is whether I want to start a new "Thriving in TECO" tutorial
or add to my original guide. The old guide takes too much scrolling for
a cheat sheet, so maybe it's time to trash the idea of a survival
guide and add the new, advanced material at the same time as I tighten-
up the formatting.

With that in mind, I've been trying to check the guide contents
against available versions of TECO. On LCM's DEC-10, TECO works like
my guide and the TOPS-10 TECO Programmer's Reference Manual[3] say it
should. TECO is even integrated into the monitor so that you can
specify the file to edit on the command line, which seems to have
been unusual in the TOPS-10 world.

On TWENEX.ORG, we have both @TECO and @TV (Video TECO). However,
neither handle command line file names. However, there's no
documentation for either. @TECO seems to handle most of the TOPS-10
TECO commands except for EB (select file for input and output), and
you can accomplish the same thing as EB by executing the ER (select
file for input) and EW (select file for output) commands on the same
file. @VT is a different implementation from the "Video TECO" that has
a few reverences in Google. It appears to support the same editing
commands, but I have yet to figure out any of the commands for file
input and output.

Andy Valencia (vandys) put his own implementation of TECO on the SDF
cluster as part of the TWENEX project. I had trouble finding it until
I figured out that the executable has been named `te`. Except for not
supporting command line file names, it appears to work pretty much
like the DEC-10 version, though I haven't tested it thoroughly.


[1]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TECO.html
[2]: http://sdf.org/?tutorials/survival-teco
[3]: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS10_softwareNotebooks/vol03/AA-0999E-TB_TECO_Aug77.pdf

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