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Kedit, the text editor of John McPhee
3 points by a3n on Sept 29, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html

> McPhee sat down at his computer and clicked around. Green text appeared on a black screen. That was all: green text. No icons, rulers, or scrollbars.

> McPhee began to type in command lines.

  x coded.*

  dir coded.*

  x coded-10.tff

  x coded-16.tff
> Up came portions of his book “The Founding Fish.” He typed in further commands, and hunks of green text went blinking around: a complete inventory of his published articles; his 1990 book, “Looking for a Ship.”

> I felt as if I were in a computer museum, watching the curator take his favorite oddity for a spin. McPhee has never used a traditional word processor in his life. He is one of the world’s few remaining users of a program called Kedit, which he writes about, at great length, in “Draft No. 4.” Kedit was created in the 1980s and then tailored, by a friendly Princeton programmer, to fit McPhee’s elaborate writing process.



Interesting; I have never heard of this editor before now.




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