Version 3.0

You can perform useful editing with TECO, the venerable, line-noise-for-command-language Editor that Time Forgot, knowing just 3 rules and 16 commands.

1.Pressing the Escape key (shown as $ below — not a dollar sign) twice executes typed commands instead of the Enter key. (A single $ terminates string arguments for some commands.) 2.Commands don't have to be executed one-at-a-time. You can type a long series of commands then “$ $” and TECO will execute the commands in order. 3.TECO is character-oriented, so it remembers the character position of your current location in the file, called “pointer”. Most commands display or change the file's contents at pointer, or move pointer to another location in the file.

1. ERfile$Y1 Open file for input 9. J Jump to beginning of file 2. EWfile$1 Open file for output 10. ZJ Jump to end of file 3. EX Save and exit 11. T3 Type from pointer to end of line 4. ^C ^C Exit (no save) 12. V Type current line 5. C2 Move character forward 13. D2 Delete character at pointer 6. R2 Move character backward 14. K3 Delete current line 7. L3 Move to beginning of next line 15. Stext$ Search for text 8. Itext$ Insert text 16. FStext1$text2$ Substitute text2 for text1

1 Some versions of TECO accept a file name as a command line argument, making 1. and 2. unnecessary. Some versions of TECO have a command EBfile$Y that does the same as 1. and 2. in one step. 2 Numeric prefix: move/delete multiple characters (negative reverses direction) 3 Numeric prefix: move/type/delete multiple lines (negative reverses direction); (T, K only) prefix H: type/delete whole file

“You can hack anything you want with TECO …”

This page is based on Survival TECO Version 2.0 at SDF.