R68-25 An On-Line Editor

With the growing abundance of time-sharing systems we begin to hear more and more about text editors. These programs were originally designed to satisfy the common need for creating and modifying source language programs for the various programming language processors found in a time-sharing system. Soon it became obvious that editors could be used in many other situations, for example, in data preparation, report generation, manuscript editing, and in some cases even as the programming language itself. This paper describes a text editor, QED, which has been in use in the Berkeley time-sharing system for the SDS-930 and which has benefited from two and a half years of user experience.