Re: [TUHS] screen editors

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 9:32 PM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > but…damn, even ex/vi 3.x is huge
>
> It was so excesssive right from the start that I refused to use it.
> Sam was the first screen editor that I deemed worthwhile, and I
> still use it today.
>
> Doug
>
Oh so true; although the early version from 2BSD was smaller.   I bet my
fingers are still only using much of that subset ;-)  But I certainly
watched it grow and grow over the years.   I'm really not so sure about
'vim' -- it has become as much of a feature sink as emacs.

FWIW: When I went from PDP-10 land to UNIX, I learned ed for 5th edition
and somewhat pined for a screen editor.   Soon after upgrading to 6th
edition at CMU, we found a visual editor called Fred - the Friendly Editor,
from Cornell IIRC (I think it's on the original USENIX tape but I don't
remember how we got it).  I had to hack in the Perkin-Elmer Fox terminal
support, but it was a superset of V6 ed so a pretty trivial learning curve.

However, since Fred had the terminal support compiled it and when I went to
Tektronix a few years later, I had to add a whole bunch of new terminals
and we quickly started running into the address issues on the 11/40 class
systems.   Mark Bales was working as a summer student and had brought 2BSD
with him (inc. vi and csh).  Poof, thanks to termcap ex/vi could run on
most every terminal we already had (in some manner) which Fred could not.
 And because of termcap not having to keep the code for the other terminals
not being used in memory, even though the editor itself was more complex,
we could just squeeze that version on an 11/40 class system running Seventh
Edition.  That made me take notice.  Again it was ed under the covers so
the transition was easy. I was pretty impressed with termcap, and soon
thereafter I found myself sending Mary Ann a couple of new terminal
definitions for some missing Tek terminals like Tek 4025.

With the VAX, and new ex/vi shows up and it would not run on the PDP-11's,
I was disappointed.   But the old version still worked and I had started to
notice that a *version of **vi *had started to show up on most everything I
used, from VMS to the Cray's and later the PCs, so really I never looked
back.  It became the most portable editor for my fingers as I had long ago
forgotten EMACS (even when we got Vaxen and Gosling EMACS shows up on the
UNIX scene, I never bother to really relearn it - I can use it if I have
too, but not as well as vi these days).

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