Re: Input line editing

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> And line editing is much less needed when you have all the nice
> command completion in there.

Maybe for typical TOPS-20 command lines.  Definitely not so for me; I
moderately routinely issue commands like

% ( bzcat */log.bz2 ; cat curlog ) | awk 'NR==1 { base = $1; } { printf("%d %d 
%s\n",$1-base,$7,substr($3,1,6)); }' | sort +1n | sed -e 's@\(.*\) \(.*\) 
\(.*\)@< \3/log | sed -e '\''s/.*[[]//'\'' -e '\''s/[]].*//'\'' -e '\''s/.*/\2 
& \1/'\'@ | sh | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

which are utterly hopeless to create without some kind of real editing,
even if everything in sight were subject to completion.  (That's not a
real example; I'm not even sure I have all the syntax right.  But it
would be hard to pick out as the synthetic example from amid a
half-dozen real examples.)

I have some reason to think I'm unusual in this respect, but I daresay
there are plenty of other ways completion doesn't make up for lack of
real editing too.

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