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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.'"
This is good history to remember. Those who weren't there find it hard to appreciate the tremendous leap forward of Unix Version 6 and ed on a PDP-11. We had been using teco on our PDP-10 and the cousin of ed that was on Multics, but we had been getting into PDP-11s for more and more things. Comparing ed on Unix with the line editors available on PDP-11 DOS/BATCH and that new-fangeled RT-11 thing was amazing. Along with all the other tools available on Unix, the PDP-11 went from a toy to a state-of-the-art (for then) development environment. We were mostly on DECwriters and TI-Silent 700s runing hardwired 1200 baud at work and 300 baud from home over the modems. We started to get VT-100s about the time vi was being released and it was again a great leap forward.
Thanks Bill Joy! I have used your work in the BSDs and Suns and all the followons over the years, but vi was a most important gift at an important time.
Oh dear back to the eighties.
I think the easiest way to sum up Emacs vs Vi is "vi" is for System Admins and people who want to get the job done quickly and efficiently without having to learn Control and Esc commands (if you look "vi" commands they are surprisingly logical compared to "Emacs"), while Emacs is for people who either have dedicated terminals or have a masochistic streak. This is not to say "vi" is better than "Emacs" in fact it is the other way round and if you are prepared to learn it then it is extremely powerful and can make you much more productive. Of course I am generalising but I do remember the first "vi" vs "Emacs" wars.
If you want a graphical editor there is "gvim" or "xEmacs" both great if you have a GUI, however if you are moving between different Unix machines you have to remember that "xEmacs" or even "Emacs" as well as other so called "free" editors may not be installed so that is why most Systems Admins learn "vi" rather than learn "Emacs". Of course if you are a Systems Admin you should at least be aware of how to use "ed" as well.
To sum up. If you like and can use an editor (not just "vi" or "Emacs") productively then go for it.
Now bring on the "car" analogies. Please no "edlin" since you should be marked as "funny" or "troll"!
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
vi was a horror when I started using UNIX systems and I couldn't understand why anyone would want to use such a strange editor. So I went with emacs and was happy. But after a while (dunno how this happened) I went back to vi(m) and invested the necessary time to learn it. I took me about a year before I could say that I'm able to use it efficiently, so the learning curve is pretty heavy. But at the end I don't regret it at all, because I feel a lot more efficient with vi(m) than with any other editor. I couldn't live without it now.
Good tools are hard to master.