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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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A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages
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(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
Even more fun was "rvi" which was a retro-separation of the "draw stuff on a screen" from the "do the editing using ed" back end. The version I used was distinct from the later "vim --remote" but may have inspired it.
300 baud connection to the server mostly felt fast enough as long as you had a reasonably snappy computer running the screen-editor portion. And yeah, your typing and sending editing commands off to the server was the highest priority. Next was the "pulling down lines from the server so I can display them" loop. It was an incredible kludge.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:31PM
I guess this is where we disagree.
It's not a kludge. It's good design.
I miss it every day, in programs that are so poorly designed they're ignoring my input while trying to push out unneeded (and unwanted) screen updates that never needed to happen at all, let alone as interrupts.
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