no-herd
maintainer-needed@gentoo.org
TECO /tee'koh/ /n.,v. obs./ 1. [originally an acronym for `[paper] Tape
Editor and COrrector'; later, `Text Editor and COrrector'] /n./ A text
editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody. With all
the dialects included, TECO may have been the most prolific editor in
use before EMACS, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its
powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably hairy
syntax. It is literally the case that every string of characters is a
valid TECO program (though probably not a useful one); one common game
used to be mentally working out what the TECO commands corresponding to
human names did.
In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history, having
been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by EMACS. Descendants of
an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted by DEC can still be
found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems,
however, and ports of the more advanced MIT versions remain the focus
of some antiquarian interest.