[CLUE-Tech] OT: FreeVMS -> EDT on Linux

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 30 Mar 2002 12:07:10 -0700
Dave Anselmi <anselmi at americanisp.net> wrote:

> "Jed S. Baer" wrote:
> 
> > Looks like mostly a pipe-dream to me, but perhaps of interest to some
> >   http://www.freevms.org/
> 
> Well, life is too short for me to want to learn OpenBSD.  Guess it's
> *way* to short to learn VMS ;-)

Oh, you poor soul. To have never experience the grace and elegance ...

Uh, sorry. There's much to like about old DEC stuff. Didn't have
redirection like unix does, although with work you could accomplish the
same thing by reasigning SYS$OUTPUT and SYS$INPUT. I hear new releases
have it though. Most of my IT career has been in a DEC environment, mostly
RSTS, RSX, and VMS. <Experience reverie, here>

There are still times (very infrequent these days) when I think it'd be
fun to get a PDP-11/83 to play with. They have a very nice assembly
language, and memory model much nicer than the PC (except it's capped at
4MB).

> > If anyone's interested, I'm going to try out the EDT clones. As a
> > long-time EDT user, I'm hoping for the editing bliss that neither vi
> > nor emacs can deliver.
> 
> I guess you mean on Linux.  Does EDT really use the keypad for
> everything?  I like vi because I don't have to fumble around for the
> mouse, or even arrow keys.  The keypad seems just as bad.

Actually, on the  old VT100 keypad, it was such a short reach, that you
quickly got used to it. I've never been able to code as quickly with
anything else. When DEC introduced the LK201 keyboard, which is
dimensionally very close to the modern PC-104 size, well, I never _really_
got used to it. The big advantage over vi is that it's stateless. The
advantage or emacs is the commands aren't long/strange "space-cadet"
keyboard equivalents. If I wanted to "chord", I'd play the piano. Despite
using vi now for almost 6 years, I still find myself typing "commands"
into the buffer on occasion.

BTW, the "ED" program compiled and runs on Linux. Regrettably, it seems to
be restricting the keyboard low-level bindings based upon, well, something
I haven't discovered. Pity. Sorta looks like it's tied to some
interpretation of monitor. Not completely surprising, since in the old
days, that was how things were. I suspect it's completely ignorant of any
notion of a windowed environment. It hasn't been maintained for years, but
it is GPL'd.

The other program - sedt - didn't compile clean.

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