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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

Short for "what you
see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could
manipulate the file by moving through the displayed
text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."See Richard
Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor"
(1987).
http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt
Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to
expand TECO's functionality in similar fashion upon his
return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called
Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after
the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's
hack switched TECO from its usual abstract
command-execution mode to a more intuitive
keystroke-by-keystroke mode. Stallman revised the
feature in a subtle but significant way. He made it
possible to trigger other TECO command strings, or "
macros," using other, two-key combinations. Where users
had once entered command strings and discarded them
after entering then, Stallman's hack made it possible
to save macro tricks on file and call them up at will.


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