Harvard University used to teach an assembly language class back in the 80's, taught on a mainframe - a VAX 11/780 or similar I seem to recall. This was an open enrollment class, available to evening and summer students. That class was, well it as Assembly, so it was difficult. The homework assignments were odd, seemingly unrelated. At the midterm, the professor handed out a makefile that combined every assignment to date, and if you did your homework correctly, a mini version of Vi was produced. The rest of the class with polishing that version of Vi, all in assembly 11/780. Taught me one hell of a lot!
It's incredible how good of a design Vi is. Try this experiment: Busybox includes a tiny clone of vi with a reduced feature set. It's very stripped down when compared to Vim or even other vi clones, but as a pure text editor it's still more powerful than most modern day IDEs.
I love my Jetbrains IDEs, but you can take my Vim plugin from my cold dead hands :)
It's interesting how this design was forced into existence by the extremely limited hardware at the time:
TFA>> It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem.
That's why we got commands like d), d{, D, etc. Trying to achieve the goal in one go, without any intermediate redraws.
>> It's incredible how good of a design Vi is.
>It's interesting how this design was forced into existence by the extremely limited hardware at the time
Can we learn that if you design something for a constrained environment, it will shine when the limitation is lifted?
That's a great point. On modern systems, there's a false economy where editor stunts are not going make most people a significantly faster programmer. (Although some ppl just like them, e.g thinking they are "more powerful".) But on a very slow terminal, these things really did make a huge difference.
> That's why we got commands like d), d{, D, etc. Trying to achieve the goal in one go, without any intermediate redraws.
This is 1/2 of explaining why vi family is the GOAT. The remaining explanation is that vi family is the only text editor which is able to be used completely without looking at the keyboard or touching the mouse even once. You can not achieve this if you have to use accord commands which are typically binded to what is selected by mouse. No vim-less text editor can ever provide one-click analog of o command (make a new line under the cursor from wherever column the cursor is at the moment of clicking).
I have used VI for many, many years and honestly use perhaps 25% at best of its abilities. But still I get comments about how fast and smoothly I can use it from other developers. Which I think speaks to how powerful even the basic editor can be.
And yes, you can also take my VIM plugin (for Visual Studio) from my cold dead hands.
Same here. Tbh, you're comment just inspired to do a deep dive on VI. Wonder how much more productivity I can squeeze out if I spend an weekend focused on it.
It is worth knowing pure vi to some extent. To the point you raise, it's pretty much guaranteed to exist on any system you're on. That's not true of anything else, even vim
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to use vi or nano and not had another option in 15 years programming. Optimising for that use case is not an efficient use of time.
I would say it’s incredible to see the quality and “durability” of Linux/Unix tools. The other day I wondered “how old is grep”, looked it up and realized that I use a piece of software that’s over 50 years old on a daily basis.
The fact that these tools have stood the extreme test of time is really something.
Back in '94 I remember motherfsking some paper I was writing late at night in the computer lab. I think the wordprocessor was AmiPro, and it was giving me grief to the extent that I was at the point of violence.
Another person in the lab came over, invited me to his machine and showed me LaTeX in Emacs. We became friends (he a mathematician, I a zoologist). I bought beer; he brought 'computer wisdom'. Thirty-odd years later, those files are still perfectly reproducible. All of my kid's school reports from elementary onwards... LaTeX.
It's hard to overstress how important is longevity in a toolset.
Side rant on Emacs' keybinds: with orderless and vertico (and marginalia and whichkey) it is almost as fast for me to `M-x dir` as to `C-x d`, and in both cases I get a dired buffer. Aaand, `dired` is magic. History also tells me that it is older than Emacs.
Of course, TECO is the explicit ancestor of emacs, as emacs was originally implemented as TECO macros. However, I can't find a paper trail giving similar credit to TECO for vi. That said, istuff<esc> is the same in TECO as it is in vi and TECO (1963) well predated vi (1976). RSTS (along with TECO) was used at Berkeley in 1974 before v6 Unix was installed by Ken Thompson on a sabbatical to his alma mater in 1975. Bill Joy started as a grad student at Berkeley that same year. emacs (1976) wasn't ported to Unix until the 80s.
There's no hard evidence and neither Ken Thompson nor Joy has ever mentioned TECO. So I'm probably wrong.
TECO was just a DEC line editor, not entirely unlike ed/ex. The idea of TECO managing a display terminal (i.e. the environment in which emacs was written as a bunch of macros) came much later, and really only existed at MIT.
Glass TTY terminals were very new in the early 70's. TECO was primarily written to the "Knight TV" system, which was a fancy MMIO framebuffer array hooked up to a PDP-10 that would multiplex a bunch of displays and keyboards. There really was no "terminal" device per se, it was all software. There were other such devices (the MIT one was actually inspired by a similar system at Stanford), but nothing compatible enough to target an editor.
So basically if you were at MIT you'd understand TECO as the pinnacle of editting . But no one else could use it.
By the time Joy started writing vi, the idea of a "terminal" being a serial-connected device speaking a byte protocol with a handful of reasonable operations (position cursor, clear screen, etc...) had solidified. So a portable editor that would work with multiple devices was feasible. Emacs wouldn't get that for a few years yet.
TECO was a character-oriented editor. Also, it was widely available on RSTS, RSX, RT-11, ... and other DEC systems in the mid-70s. There's a character cursor. So if you opened a file with:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy.
The cursor would start before the T. 4C would position the cursor before the q. The 6D would delete quick . Then <esc><esc> would execute the command buffer.
These fingers of mine learned TECO before they learned vi and then found vi easier to learn as a result. Besides the basic editing syntax, it was a programmable editor, hence the TECO emacs macros.
Funny thing is that as fondly as I remember TECO, I've tried emacs a few times and have always worked my way back to vi/vim. I particularly like neovim now. I like using ex/command mode for doing bulk editing. Of course you can do the same thing in emacs but I've gotten used to it in vi. I remember programming TECO but I don't remember ever doing programmed editing.
I started with TECO (Text Editor Character Oriented) on Caltech's PDP-10 back in 1975. There were no glass ttys, just DECwriters and ASR-33s (ugh). I.e. TECO was a line editor.
A couple years later, ADM-3A's arrived. And so did a TECO macro that turned TECO into a screen editor! Oh, what joy!
Isn't it a amazing that a macro could turn a line editor into a screen editor?
I was a TECO user on RSX-11M, then switched to FINE (Fine Is Not EMACS :-)) on Top 10 & 20. When I started at Sun I started using vi but on the Amiga I continued to use MicroEMACS which felt a bit like FINE[1]. After Sun I pretty much stuck to vi because it was so much faster over a remote X11 connection than EMACS was.
Also used PFE32 for a while on the Amiga, sad that the source for that never made it out.
[1] I still have Craig Finseth's thesis "A Cookbook for an Emacs" which talks about designing FINE.
Vim is awesome! For my hobby project, Vimgolf.ai , I am trying to make it easier and more fun to learn vim by being gradually introduced to the different motions. I am eventually trying to create different bots to create a standard of difficulty for each level but that is TBD at the moment.
Is the "Controlled Neovim Terminal" supposed to be some bot you are competing with? At first it confused me. Personally I think the first contact with the game would be much more intuitive without it (it can always be introduced later, e.g. if you plan competitions with other humans on randomly generated levels).
There are only two levels now, right? As I equaled both top scores (possibly optimal?)... when more? ;)
> The creator of MINIX, Andrew Tanenbaum, asked the community to choose between Stevie and Elvis to be adopted as the main text editor for their OS. Elvis was chosen and it's the default text editor on MINIX until today.
Up to now I have been using elvis exclusively, rather than vim, both on Windows and Linux - I never saw the need to switch, since elvis does everything I need. I just retired it last month, when I upgraded some systems to the latest release of Debian Bookworm and the elvis graphic interface started crashing the whole X windows manager. I have the source code, but I don't have the patience to recompile and debug it.
The ancestor of all those full screen terminal editors is the RAND editor, which was on Unix around 1974.[1]
Few people outside the DoD research community saw it, because it wasn't free and only worked on some terminals. Functions were triggered by dedicated function keys, not key combos or a command line, and it was customary to use something with 8 to 10 function keys, such as the HP2645A. You could split the screen, edit two files, and do cut and paste. Way ahead of its time.
I used the rand editor in early 80s & loved its “infinite” quarter plane model. Dave Yost enhanced it quite a bit and called it the Grand editor. But it was hard to maintain as it relied on K&R C. Eventually I gave up and went back to vi.
It always amaze me that I was only introduced to them in my adult life way after Windows, but still for me they are the definition of what computer is.
So this is not really about (personal) nostalgia.
Also in the age of 8K screens, VR, AI and AI ready computers, a lot of people still use and love vi.
Call me crazy but my guess is there might still be vi users in 50 years.
Readit News
I love my Jetbrains IDEs, but you can take my Vim plugin from my cold dead hands :)
It's interesting how this design was forced into existence by the extremely limited hardware at the time:
TFA>> It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem.
That's why we got commands like d), d{, D, etc. Trying to achieve the goal in one go, without any intermediate redraws.
Can we learn that if you design something for a constrained environment, it will shine when the limitation is lifted?
I would like to select first have a visual feedback of what I selected before taking action on it . Helix and kakuone have got this right .
I often find myself going to visual mode to emulate this.
It's unbeatable when editing files on a remote server in a hurry and from random places that may or may not have good latency and/or bandwidth.
This is 1/2 of explaining why vi family is the GOAT. The remaining explanation is that vi family is the only text editor which is able to be used completely without looking at the keyboard or touching the mouse even once. You can not achieve this if you have to use accord commands which are typically binded to what is selected by mouse. No vim-less text editor can ever provide one-click analog of o command (make a new line under the cursor from wherever column the cursor is at the moment of clicking).
And yes, you can also take my VIM plugin (for Visual Studio) from my cold dead hands.
First thing I install on any IDE/Editor.
That doesn’t mean it’s actually the fastest tool for the real job. Programming is not text editing
The fact that these tools have stood the extreme test of time is really something.
Another person in the lab came over, invited me to his machine and showed me LaTeX in Emacs. We became friends (he a mathematician, I a zoologist). I bought beer; he brought 'computer wisdom'. Thirty-odd years later, those files are still perfectly reproducible. All of my kid's school reports from elementary onwards... LaTeX.
It's hard to overstress how important is longevity in a toolset.
Side rant on Emacs' keybinds: with orderless and vertico (and marginalia and whichkey) it is almost as fast for me to `M-x dir` as to `C-x d`, and in both cases I get a dired buffer. Aaand, `dired` is magic. History also tells me that it is older than Emacs.
\end{rant}
Deleted Comment
Of course, TECO is the explicit ancestor of emacs, as emacs was originally implemented as TECO macros. However, I can't find a paper trail giving similar credit to TECO for vi. That said, istuff<esc> is the same in TECO as it is in vi and TECO (1963) well predated vi (1976). RSTS (along with TECO) was used at Berkeley in 1974 before v6 Unix was installed by Ken Thompson on a sabbatical to his alma mater in 1975. Bill Joy started as a grad student at Berkeley that same year. emacs (1976) wasn't ported to Unix until the 80s.
There's no hard evidence and neither Ken Thompson nor Joy has ever mentioned TECO. So I'm probably wrong.
But I still consider TECO to be the ur editor.
Glass TTY terminals were very new in the early 70's. TECO was primarily written to the "Knight TV" system, which was a fancy MMIO framebuffer array hooked up to a PDP-10 that would multiplex a bunch of displays and keyboards. There really was no "terminal" device per se, it was all software. There were other such devices (the MIT one was actually inspired by a similar system at Stanford), but nothing compatible enough to target an editor.
So basically if you were at MIT you'd understand TECO as the pinnacle of editting . But no one else could use it.
By the time Joy started writing vi, the idea of a "terminal" being a serial-connected device speaking a byte protocol with a handful of reasonable operations (position cursor, clear screen, etc...) had solidified. So a portable editor that would work with multiple devices was feasible. Emacs wouldn't get that for a few years yet.
These fingers of mine learned TECO before they learned vi and then found vi easier to learn as a result. Besides the basic editing syntax, it was a programmable editor, hence the TECO emacs macros.
Funny thing is that as fondly as I remember TECO, I've tried emacs a few times and have always worked my way back to vi/vim. I particularly like neovim now. I like using ex/command mode for doing bulk editing. Of course you can do the same thing in emacs but I've gotten used to it in vi. I remember programming TECO but I don't remember ever doing programmed editing.
A couple years later, ADM-3A's arrived. And so did a TECO macro that turned TECO into a screen editor! Oh, what joy!
Isn't it a amazing that a macro could turn a line editor into a screen editor?
I also used TECO on my H-11 PDP-11 computer.
Also used PFE32 for a while on the Amiga, sad that the source for that never made it out.
[1] I still have Craig Finseth's thesis "A Cookbook for an Emacs" which talks about designing FINE.
Is the "Controlled Neovim Terminal" supposed to be some bot you are competing with? At first it confused me. Personally I think the first contact with the game would be much more intuitive without it (it can always be introduced later, e.g. if you plan competitions with other humans on randomly generated levels).
There are only two levels now, right? As I equaled both top scores (possibly optimal?)... when more? ;)
Point of order: Minix switched to BSD nvi in 2013 https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...
Not that it matters -- Minix itself hasn't had a commit since 2018 -- but the last five years of its life were spent without Elvis
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2008/R217...
[2] https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/HP_2645A
It always amaze me that I was only introduced to them in my adult life way after Windows, but still for me they are the definition of what computer is.
So this is not really about (personal) nostalgia.
Also in the age of 8K screens, VR, AI and AI ready computers, a lot of people still use and love vi.
Call me crazy but my guess is there might still be vi users in 50 years.
On the other hand, an Emacs clone (MicroEmacs) actually came with my Amiga 500's bundled extras disk...