I've never heard of PED. On VMS we used EDT (which I think was the precursor to TPU). EDT was notable in that the bulk of the commands were on the VT 100 keypad, much like the original PC keyboard, and not in "num lock" mode. It relied heavily on the "GOLD" Key, which was the upper left hand corner key.
The biggest thing we routinely did was either program a macro and then spam the . key. I really don't recall much of it.
Wow, the GOLD key even has its own Wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_key_(DEC)
From a Wiki page on EDT:
Quote:
DEC later developed TPU, a powerful language for designing text editors on its VMS systems. TPU was used to produce a new standard text editor, EVE, as well as to rewrite EDT. EVE included an emulator of the EDT screen mode keypad for the benefit of those who were used to particular key functions. Both EVE and the TPU implementation of EDT are still distributed with OpenVMS.
Yea, that makes sense. I didn't recall EDT being some general purpose, infinitely extensible thing. So, looks like they wrote TPU and then cloned EDT, but that was after my time.
Edit:
I will say, at the time, the GOLD key worked. It never seemed bothersome to use. Editing function was basically like doing 10 key numeric entry. There's basically 30 commands to memory, and they're all blind with no mnemonics, you just learned what 3 and GOLD 3 did. So, it was all muscle memory.
In contrast to Emacs, where you can use the ESC key for META (instead of M-X, you can do ESC-X). But since you're all over the keyboard, for me, it doesn't stick as well. The compact nature of the keypad just worked really well, and not a lot of "CTRL" pinky problems, etc.
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