[TUHS] Unix taste (Re: terminal - just for fun)

[doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)]

> To each their own.

Indeed.

> As a Vi user, nothing beats having Esc on the home row.

A symptom of why I have always detested emacs and vi. With ^D, ^C,
and ^\, Unix has more than enough mystery chords to learn. Emacs
and vi raised that number to a high power--an interface at least
as arcane and disorganized as the DD card in OS 360--baroque
efflorescences totally out of harmony with the spirit of Unix.

(Perhaps one could liken learning vi to learning how to finger
the flute, but the flute pays off with beautiful music. To put the
worst face on vi, it "pays off" only by promoting frantic tinkering.)

A modern-day analog of the undisciplined exuberance of emacs and vi:
for a good time on linux try
        less --help | wc

Does comment on taste belong in a discussion of history? I think
so. Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small
means rather than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But
evolution, including the evolution of Unix, does not work that
way. An interesting question is how the corrective of taste manages
ever to recenter the exuberance of evolution. The birth of Unix shows
it can happen. When will it happen again? Can one cite small-scale
examples that gained traction within the larger evolution of Unix?

Doug