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The Birth of vi
lanc writes "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a 'gift to mankind'. From the piece: '9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.'"
(I'm using Emacs, BTW.)
I think in vi. When editing, commands just happen like thoughts. They are so ingrained in my brain I don't even remember the actual key sequences. When a vi newbie asks, "how do you do XYZ in vi?," I have to stop and think hard, because I don't even know the commands any more.
Vi is the ultimate editor, for one main reason. It's a modal editor, so commands can be mnemonic. With editors like emacs, you're always having to hit ^X before commands, or with MS word you're always having to lift your hand off the keyboard to move the silly mouse around. With vi, you don't need a steenking mouse. Your hands never leave the keyboard. And commands make sense and don't require that you hit some yucky control sequence to initiate.
I love my vi.
ed, baby, ed
Je ne parle pas francais.
The time for dual-mode editors (where you have to press something before you can begin to type, and then press something else when you stop typing) is long since gone, thank goddess.
(ay)
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Brief (by underware) is better.
I use both VI and Emacs and I just miss Brief. I thing is that the code was sold to Borland which last I looked became Impress (which isn't impressing me) and the code base is shelved. Can we OSS the code base?
I understand the issues. What I do not understand is why the HUGE advancements in VI for instance are so obscure that I use it at only a very primative level. Then we have Emacs and xEmacs.
I think we need some courses put together for kindergarten kids. The biggest issues is that most people are not willing to spend endless hours digging through unorganised and disjointed documentation. So we don't learn what our tools can do.
This is sad.
Here is what I think. I think editors have been around for 40 years at least. Some have horrible personalities. But the issue is not the personality... it is the person who loves the personality.
So perhaps we need to ask why I cannot ask Emacs to present the full "Brief" personality. I know that Emacs can do this. I've programmed a number of elisp commands. The issue then becomes.. how do we work as a community?
I am certain there are at least a billion answers. I kinda think there is a lot of code laying around that the authors of which pained over and they have "given up".
I do not know all the things VI can do. I wish I did. I wish I could rent a lecture that showed me. Numbers I got are that this costs $1000 a minuet.
Maybe this is why its not there.
Alas
Yeah, ed is the best!
"When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!"
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I haven't found vi or emacs to be hard enough.
That why I port edlin to every box I work on.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
"My PID is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process, prepare to vi. "
modded down in three, two...
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
All code that doesn't fit an 80 column terminal was written by failures.
here
I see so-called "hardcore" Unix geeks advocating 'ed'. Nonsense! The ultimate Unix editor is "cat >filename". All the others are for indecisive wimps who don't know what they're going to write, or incompetent losers who make mistakes.
:w saves!
I actually want that on a t-shirt. I would do it myself, but I don't think my stenciling skills are up to the task.
nstresting comment!:wq
"I edit that I edit".
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Naw, man, sed is way better than ed!
Real geeks use an editor that doesn't display anything at all. And with sed, I can screw up all the files in a directory at once, instead of one at a time with ed.
That's all I have to say, but I think it had to be sed.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)