[gopher] OT: Anyone interested in text editor programming?
Hello, world!
I know this is a Gopher mailing list, but I know that there are some
budding developers among you. Recently, I have rescued some software
from the bit bucket, and I am asking, if it is not too much, if there
are any among you interested in bringing a great old editor back to
the forefront.
I am talking about TECO: the famously cryptic Text Editor and
Corrector, now made far less cryptic due to the addition of a GUI. If
you have ever done any amount of work on HP or DEC minis, you must
know what I'm talking about. If not, here's a quick rundown:
TECO was the first-ever programmer's editor to be written, in the
tradition of vi and emacs. In fact, emacs is a direct descendant of
TECO, having originally been called Editor Macros. It is included as
system standard on all manner of VAXen and PDP-10s. Its one main
drawback was that the buffer of text that was being worked on was not
visible except on-demand, and one could completely mangle a document
with just a few keystrokes, until someone managed to write a version
of TECO that displayed the text buffer all the time.
Video TECO is an attempt to re-create this great old editor in a
version that any Tom, Dick, or Harry would understand. It was written
by Paul Cantrell ten years ago; the files had been lost, until I
discovered a snapshot of the source hiding in my e-mail inbox. I've
even found a patch to make it run on Linux. So I've re-released it
under the Sleepycat Licence, and I am currently enlisting developers
to help me add new features and squash bugs.
I've got plenty of documentation from DEC and HP as to how to work
this editor; I've been using it for quite a while in its old version,
and would surely appreciate video TECO. A version of video TECO
already exists on VAX, and it is only by luck that I managed to find
this version for PC.
I have just put the files on SourceForge, and they are available at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/newteco/. Please assist me in this
great endeavour.
Cordially,
Nick Matavka.
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