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A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages

posted by chromas on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the :wq dept.

hubie writes:

Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.

"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," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:14AM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:14AM (#725110)

    No, Vi dates from an Age when ALL of the terminals were ASCII terminals. All of the users used a text only terminal all day long and they didn't even dream of anything better because they knew the "glass ttys" were the new hotness, replacing teletype terminals that dumped all output on hardcopy at pitiful character per second rates. And you were lucky if your terminal had the full ASCII character set.

    And ya know what? They probably got as much or more actual work done.

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  • (Score: 2) by archfeld on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:23PM

    by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:23PM (#725363) Journal

    True enough. When I started working the only systems that had a graphical interface was a Cray and some of the high end SunOS/Solaris systems. Everything else was ASCII/3270 terminals. By the time I moved into other areas, ONLY the system consoles on some or the *nix and RISC systems still were ASCII/3270 types and only during reboot or maintenance when in single user mode/init 0/1 situations was the requirement for VI present but I can attest to the power and speed of a KB only editor that did not require mouse involvement. Most of the 'newer' sys admins were not fans of VI and Yank and Put vs. Cut and Paste :)

    --
    For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge