[TUHS] screen editors (FRED)

[Greg A. Woods]

At Tue, 7 Jan 2020 10:03:57 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] screen editors
>
> FWIW: When I went from PDP-10 land to UNIX, I learned ed for 5th edition
> and somewhat pined for a screen editor.   Soon after upgrading to 6th
> edition at CMU, we found a visual editor called Fred - the Friendly Editor,
> from Cornell IIRC (I think it's on the original USENIX tape but I don't
> remember how we got it).  I had to hack in the Perkin-Elmer Fox terminal
> support, but it was a superset of V6 ed so a pretty trivial learning curve.

Ah, yes, Fred.  A name with so many editors!

I used a full-screen version of an ed-like editor on V7, 32B, and 4BSD
at University of Calgary which was called the "FRiendly EDitor".  This
may be the one you mention.

The FRED I know is not to be confused with the version of QED named FRED
(Friendly Editor) that was written at the University of Waterloo for
Honeywell GECOS by Peter Fraser.  It's also not the "FRED - A Friendly
Editor" by Richard J. Botting [1].  There's also apparently an editor
named FRED for VMS, and another for Amstrad PCW systems (for editing
BASIC, and apparently written in BASIC itself).  And then there's the
one from a company called Digitool which was called "FRED:  Fred
Resembles Emacs Deliberately", which was written in Macintosh Common
Lisp.  There's also an old Windows-based "Friendly Right-to-Left Editor
(FRED)" by NSRI.  I also recently found this [2] reference to a "FRED",
but it seems to be yet another completely different kind of editor using
the same name.

[1] http://www.csci.csusb.edu/dick/papers/rjb84a.FRED.mth

[2] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5141603-fred-program-development-tool

    Abstract:

    The structured, screen-based editor FRED is introduced.  FRED
    provides incremental parsing and semantic analysis.  The parsing is
    based on an LL(1) top-down algorithm which has been modified to
    provide follow-the-cursor parsing and soft templates.  The languages
    accepted by the editor are LL(1) languages with the addition of the
    Unknown and preferred production non-terminal classes.  The semantic
    analysis is based on the incremental update of attribute grammar
    equations.  We briefly describe the interface between FRED and an
    automated reference librarian system that is under development.

    FRED User's Manual
    Shilling, J.
    Illinois University, Urbana
    Department of Computer Science
    Feb. 1984

    FRED, the frinedly editor, is a screen-based structured editor.
    This manual is intended to serve the needs of a wide range of users
    of the FRED text editor.  Most users will find it sufficient to read
    the introductory material in section 2, supplemented with the full
    command set description in section 3.  Advanced users may wish to
    change the keystroke sequences which invoke editor commands.
    Section 4 describes how to change key bindings and how to define
    command macros.  Some users may need to modify a language
    description or create an entirely new language description for use
    with FRED.  Section 5 describes the format of the language
    descriptions used by the editor, and describes how to construct a
    language grammar.  Section 6 describes known portability problems of
    the FRED editor and should concern only system installation
    personnel.  The editor points out syntax errors in the file being
    edited and does automatic pretty printing.


The version of Fred I used had a full-screen line-oriented mode as well
as what was called "open" mode which presented a much more direct
full-screen editing experience (though it was a bit quirky, but it
reminded me a bit of "Electric Pencil II" which I had used on a Sol-20).
Open mode of course generated an interrupt for every key press and so on
a PDP-11/60 with 16 terminals it could cause quite a system load, and
most of us avoided using open mode on the PDPs.  Even the VAX 11/780
running 32V was sometimes slowed by it, but it had at least 24 terminals
as I recall (at the time it was still running 32V), so a room full of
students feverously typing away was quite a lot of input.

I've been unable to find any other reference or mention of this version
of Fred; and to the best of my searches it's not on any Usenix tape I
can find a copy of.

If anyone has any further info about the FRED Clem and/or I seem to
remember, please do post it!

I soon forgot most that I knew about Fred though once Gosling Emacs was
installed on the VAX (after it had been upgraded to 4BSD).  I already
had a strong preference to Emacs having used it extensively on the
Multics system at UofC.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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