As someone who used TECO, ed, and vi, I think moral editing was a logical outgrowth of being an extension of ex, which was an extension of ed. I don’t disagree with your assessment of TECO as aDSL for text (old puzzle: what would TECO do if you typed in your name, or for that matter, EMACS began its life as a set of TECO macros).
You know the Charles Simonyi story about Bravo, I assume? To invoke it, you typed “edit” to the command line. One day, he’d forgotten that he had already started the editor, and he typed “edit”, which the editor interpreted as “Everything Delete, Insert ‘t’”. When he left for Microsoft he declared that no editor (e.g., the first version of Word) would have modes.
I don’t remember if Wordperfect has modes, or not.
Also, Emacs has modes which change the keyboard mapping for the kind of editing you’re doing (text, source code (language specific modes, at that), shell commands, debugger commands, etc).
As someone who used TECO, ed, and vi, I think moral editing was a logical outgrowth of being an extension of ex, which was an extension of ed. I don’t disagree with your assessment of TECO as aDSL for text (old puzzle: what would TECO do if you typed in your name, or for that matter, EMACS began its life as a set of TECO macros).
You know the Charles Simonyi story about Bravo, I assume? To invoke it, you typed “edit” to the command line. One day, he’d forgotten that he had already started the editor, and he typed “edit”, which the editor interpreted as “Everything Delete, Insert ‘t’”. When he left for Microsoft he declared that no editor (e.g., the first version of Word) would have modes.
I don’t remember if Wordperfect has modes, or not.
Also, Emacs has modes which change the keyboard mapping for the kind of editing you’re doing (text, source code (language specific modes, at that), shell commands, debugger commands, etc).