When I first started programming in a real language — as opposed to the BASIC (line numbers and all) that came with my TRS-80 — I was in college. In the late eighties, Borland ruled the development world with their Turbo line of products, so I used Turbo Pascal, and, later, Turbo C and C++.

These tools combined an editor and compiler into a single program, and made the whole linking/compiling/running/testing process a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Because they came on the scene before the rise of Windows, they also had their own interface, primarily cribbed from the keystrokes of (wait for it) WORDSTAR, a by-now-forgotten former giant of the word processing market. I coded enough to know those keystrokes by heart back then, 15 years or so ago.

My coding life was pretty short, though; I quickly moved from jobs where I actually made things work into jobs where I talked about ways to make things work, and pretty much lost any real coding skill. About a year ago, though, I started a project where I ended up contributing no small amount of code, and it felt good and fun, and I remembered what I liked about programming.

Until a couple months ago, I did all this new coding in a fancy modern editor that I still use for plenty of things, but since then I’ve realized I needed to assimilate another powerful editor for use on remote machines, via command lines.

It’s using this tool that brought me to the realization that my fingers, in a control-key-based, non-GUI program, still remember some of those old Wordstar keystrokes, and will resort to using them without telling me. I keep hitting Control-Y to delete lines, which iis most definitely NOT delete-line in emacs. It was, of course, delete-line back in Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Weird.