We had TECO on our DEC VAXes running VMS in the early-mid 1980s. It had a ”VT52” mode (as you say, a macro), and at least one of the terminals on my desk supported those escape sequences. Wikipedia says the VT52 terminal was made from 1975 to 1978, so those macros were probably fairly early. By this stage, TECO distribution was fragmented with various incompatible versions around, so probably some lacked that macro or other full-screen macros.
Although I had a terminal which could run TECO full screen, I found that too slow and just used it in line mode. You could conveniently reprint surrounding lines by adding a few characters to the end of a commmand (I still have HT <ESC> <ESC> burned into my brain.) The VT52 macro had you typing commands into line 24 like an emacs minibuffer.
I never used it for all my editing, but it excelled at certain things.
The version of TECO we had was the one which shipped with VMS. At some point later on, I think, DEC stopped shipping it, and we migrated to a TECO-inspired full-screen editor developed by another university. Once that arrived, we hard-core TECO users, all 4 of us, were won over within a week.
A lot of the "elite" compsci students at my college in the early-ish 80s were still using TECO on our DECSYSTEM 2060 but some of the cool-kids were trying that new Emacs thing ;)
Me, being just a lowly compsci minor, prefered the full screen editor called FOXE. Was very simply to use and did the job fine for writing/editing programs of the length typical of homework assignments. Don't recall all the particulars to comment on search, replace, etc.
Unfortunately, there is like zero internet info on it beyond: "Little (if any) information is available for this visual editor available for TOPS-20 in the early 1980's. It was similar in appearance to the then new EMACS but had a far simpler command structure."
Although I had a terminal which could run TECO full screen, I found that too slow and just used it in line mode. You could conveniently reprint surrounding lines by adding a few characters to the end of a commmand (I still have HT <ESC> <ESC> burned into my brain.) The VT52 macro had you typing commands into line 24 like an emacs minibuffer.
I never used it for all my editing, but it excelled at certain things.
The version of TECO we had was the one which shipped with VMS. At some point later on, I think, DEC stopped shipping it, and we migrated to a TECO-inspired full-screen editor developed by another university. Once that arrived, we hard-core TECO users, all 4 of us, were won over within a week.