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

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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:17PM (#724899)

    WYSIWYG may be good for quickly learning basic commands, but like LATEX, computers are better suited for the grunt work of formatting.

    I worked with a physicist at los alamos who was very good with both Tex ad vi. It was impossible to follow him as he reworked his entire paper - just a bunch of screen flashes, blocks disappearing, reappearing for a few minutes. After which a whole new paper magically appeared, perfectly formatted.

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