SciTECO is an interactive TECO dialect, similar to Video TECO. It also adds features from classic TECO-11, as well as unique new ideas.

The basic approach to text editing is both radically different and surprisingly similar to popular editors like Vi or EMacs. Instead of using mostly keyboard commands to modify text in a visual manner, in SciTECO you edit a program (called macro) using very few keyboard commands (called immediate editing commands). This program edits text for the user and is executed immediately, as far as possible. For instance, moving the cursor to the right can be done immediatly via the "C" command which is a part of the editor language. The language is the editor so to speak. When you delete a character from the end of the command line macro (called rubout), the side-effects of that character which may be a command or part of a command, are undone.

SciTECO uses the Scintilla editor component and supports GTK+ as well as NCurses frontends (using Scinterm). The NCurses frontend also works with PDCurses/XCurses and its win32a port. Both Linux and Windows (MinGW 32/64) are supported.

• All of the basic Video TECO commands supported
• Operator precedence in arithmetic expressions and an argument stack that may be modified by the user (commands may have more than two arguments)
• Extended Q-Register namespace (arbitrary strings): can be used to build libraries and can be abused as a data structure
• Make use of your keyboard's function keys by assigning them to strings inserted into the command stream
• Many TECO-11 features, like that most commands have a colon-modified form, string-building characters, exotic match characters
• Interactivity: supports filename completion via immediate editing commands (e.g. <TAB> in commands accepting filenames); immediate searching (similar to search-as-you-type); context-sensitive immediate editing commands
• Command rubout: SciTECO can even undo file writes (EW command)
• Munging: Macros may be munged, that is executed in batch mode. By default, a profile is munged.
• Syntax highlighting, styles, line numbers, etc. thanks to Scintilla

There are prebuilt binary packages and source bundles for your convenience:

• Download Archive
• Ubuntu PPA

For more details on building from source, please refer to INSTALL.

• There is a manpage sciteco(1) describing program invocation and SciTECO's batch mode processing.
• There is a manpage sciteco(7) describing SciTECO as a language.