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In Emacs, a text editor originating in the 1980s, the command equivalent to ^X (the cut in cut and paste) is ^W.
Today in writing a comment, not once but twice in a row, I used ^W instead of ^X to cut something preparing to paste it elsewhere.
I'm losing my mind.
EDIT: It occurs to me, I should have said that both times I typed ^W, my screen disappeared with my editing.
Comments
I’m losing mine too
I make that mistake all the time.
And I just went much too far down the rabbit hole of Emacs history and the space-cadet keyboard before realizing it doesn’t matter that Emacs originated in 1976 but was popularized in the 1980s. I believe Apple still supports ^W but it’s not exactly the same as Cut which is command-X there.
So, which is the one true command set: Gosling or Stallman? Let’s have a reformation and a counter-reformation and some crusades and religious wars; by golly, we’re on the Internet!
Tongue firmly in cheek, or as Fahlman would note, :-)
Command-W
As far as I recall, on the Mac, command-w was/is Close window, with the shift modifying it to close all windows. I don't recall the Mac supporting ^w but that may have been application specific or even in the IIe days (I feel old now).
Who remembers 'Teco'?
After years of using that editor when I worked for DEC, there is the odd occasion that I use one of its command set instead of a more recent one. Keyboard memory strikes again!
Samantha
Teco
The big challenge for Teco was working out what would happen if you entered you name as commands.
A very powerful editor but equally difficult to use.
TECO
TECO! My all time favorite editor. I could do commands in that language I have never been able to do in anything else, barring EMACS, which I found to be more of a religion than a text editor. In TECO, I could easily go through a document and replace the first of a pair of double-quotes with one string and second of the pair with a second screen for every pair in a document, even when many of the quotes were over multiple lines. (Needed when it was output to a printer with different left and right double-quotes, which looked awful with every double-quote a left double-quote.)
Closing Tab
It's not merely that I use ^W instead of ^X, it's that ^W closes my tab.
Fortunately, Firefox allows one to reopen a tab that's been closed.
-- Daphne Xu
Gosling vs Stallman
Gosling used ^X^C for something common; I forget what, but not exit-emacs. Switching to Gnu Emacs was HARD!
Catch It
Whenever you typed ^X^C in emacs, hopefully the prompt to save a file enabled you to stop the exit.
-- Daphne Xu
VIM
I still end up using VI/VIM editor commands when in google docs by accident cause I used it so much for coding.
Re: VIM
What a walk down memory lane with this geek talk. And just last night I was telling my son about how much cleaner the screen on that first digital radar we got on my ship was; so much less noise dots than the old AN/SPN-51 radar. That and electronic repair became a game of swapping circuit boards instead of tubes. Hard to believe that was 1977 and I thought I knew everything about electronics. On my next unit posting (Governors Island, NYC) a buddy had just gotten a Radio Shack computer which used his cassette tape recorder for data storage and a small TV for a display. Gave me my first taste of programming.
TRS-80
The TRS-80, giving Zylog its 15 minutes of fame.
-- Daphne Xu