SciTECO Reviews

So Vim and the editor your grandfather used in college had a baby and it grew up... This is the best freaking editor in the world. Vim is very much like Teco but it has full screen mode (it shows you the whole document as you're editing it), something I missed on new versions of Teco, including TecoC and its imitators. Editing "blind" is a pain and a deal breaker for me; if I can't see the text being edited as I'm editing it, I want a different editor. SciTeco is a full screen editor and if it came preinstalled on most computers I would suggest that everyone learn it. It's lots more flexible than Vim but not enough to annoy a beginner; in fact, I'd argue it's more user friendly than Vim because the editors we use today are character oriented ones (like Teco was from the beginning) rather than line oriented (like ed, vi, and Vim). Today's user treats the file as one long piece of text (as traditional on minicomputers) instead of detached lines (as traditional on mainframes). For example, if you type 62l (that's sixty two characters to the right) and the line is only sixty characters long, Vim will beep and issue an error. If you type 62c in Teco, and the line is only sixty characters long, Teco will go to the end of the line as far as it can, go to the next line, and complete the command. Vim also doesn't have negative commands. It has h to go up, j to go down, k to go left, l to go right. Two of those commands are redundant; moving a negative amount to the left is logically the same as moving that same amount to the right. Why not have the same commands for both, like Teco does? I can type 10c to go ten to the right, or -10c to go ten to the left. Makes more sense. The "unused" keys can be used for more features, and boy, does Teco have features. Vim does not preview commands before it completes them; this is a shame, and I've clobbered many a file due to inattention (not knowing whether in insert or command mode). SciTeco gives you a live preview of the commands you're typing, and it only commits the commands once you hit the Escape key twice. Don't like what you've done? Just backspace until you've undone your mistake. You can write your very own macros in SciTeco, too. It's customisable just like Vim; it has its own equivalent of vimrc and colour schemes. The only thing missing is a tutorial for using it. The old Teco handbook published in the 70's is still useful but not really a good fit for a total beginner. Vim comes with a tutorial file to learn to edit with it; SciTeco could do with an equivalent.