On Wed, 2022-07-20 at 08:54 -0300, George N. White III wrote:
On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 2:25 PM Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
On 7/19/22 11:03, R. G. Newbury wrote:
But I definitely didn't use vim, I used emacs :-).
Heretic! Unclean! Unclean!
I've never understood why so many people worship vi. If I need to edit a file in a terminal, I use Mork's Editor.
On early unix systems, terminals were the only user interface. At that time, vi was a big improvement over ed. Many early unix users learned vi, and now still find it available by default on most linux systems as well as macOS. Some modern editors are overly helpful and will replace ASCII characters with look-alike glyphs from Unicode fonts (opening and closing quotes, different types of space characters). Recently I'm finding many "bugs" are caused by these look-alike characters in ASCII configuration files edited by users. In vi I trust.
We couldn't even run vi at the time on our PDP-11/45 with 6th Edition UNIX. IIRC it was too big for the address space. I wrote my PhD thesis in Nroff using George Coulouris' em ('editor for mortals'), the precursor to ex, which eventually became vi. It had a single-line display but unlike ed you could see what you were doing.
poc