I am sure that once they used i.e vi to write their own text editors, they were complete experts at using it
I am sure that once they used i.e vi to write their own text editors, they were complete experts at using it
You're sure how? AFAIK they did. The blit terminal came about in 1982 (Rob wrote the jim editor for that). By then unix was already quite well cooked. sam & acme & plan9 came much later.
lunduke.substack.com
They went from ed to *graphical* editors! Bell Labs at the time could afford graphics terminals like the Blit. It was only outside the Labs that people had to make do with cheap imitations of DEC's VT52.I am sure that once they used i.e vi to write their own text editors, they were complete experts at using it
Still, one can do just fine without knowing vi and use ee or emacs or ed or whatever as they are freely available.
Sure, there was all kinds of experimentation at the time. Some solutions were adopted for widespread use, others weren't.
You won't necessarily have ee or emacs or nano, etc available. Vi is the system editor that is guaranteed to be present, its part of the definition of unix. Unless a deliberate decision has been taken to remove it, eg to lock the system down. Vi / ex <<is>> the unix system editor. It's the one that was chosen, decades ago. It is a standard part of the unix userland. None of the others are. Its a standard part of unix, like 'ls', 'cat' and 'grep', etc. The next time you get an assignment to the Amundsen-Scott research station at the south pole, you can be confident that vi will be there for you.
True, mpx and mux do predate vi. I suppose the later Plan 9's terminals also famously doesn't provide the capabilities required for vi (until an attempt at a vim port many years later), so I suppose that also checks out.
They are, as part of devel/plan9port. I still use acme when browsing through a lot of source files. I used to run acme on my internal machine and access it via a work machine through forwarded ssh tunnels and still acme would start up almost instantly.
The two main reasons to learn to use vi is that it's pretty much guaranteed that any UNIXy system you sit down at will have vi or a clone and 2 that once you get to know how to do a bit with it, it is incredibly efficient in what you can do with just a keyboard.
I'm pretty sure because teletype machines and other line printers didn't have anything but caps. I used the ADM back in the day but I don't recall if the screen was all caps or not.
Indeed, you basically need to either emulate Plan 9 in a VM (incl Inferno) or you need to bring in an entire compat layer just for a ~1MB program.
Yes, I'd forgotton the days when there was no lower case, that's a looong time ago! Quite right!
The closest clone to acme is edwood. It is cross platform and can be compiled to avoid p9p entirely. But being in Go it is about 10 times larger than acme. There are other clones but I stick to acme! Plus I find most commands in p9p useful.
plan9port is a compat layer as mentioned. Its considerable just to maintain a text editor.
It is reasonably well maintained now. 51 commits in the past year.
Lets hope they keep it up. Unfortunately large compat layers do need the work.
Usenet! Too lazy to search for it.
