Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to
write entire documents in edit mode, but as Stallman
himself would later point out, the process required "a
mental skill like that of blindfold chess."See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The
Extensible,
Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An
updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am
quoting, is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html.
To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a
system that displayed both the "source" and "display"
modes on a split screen. Despite this innovative hack,
switching from mode to mode was still a nuisance.
TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around
the computer world at this time. During a visit to the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman
encountered an edit program named E. The program
contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to
update display text after each command keystroke. In
the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the
first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors.
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