I love my Jetbrains IDEs, but you can take my Vim plugin from my cold dead hands :)
It's interesting how this design was forced into existence by the extremely limited hardware at the time:
TFA>> It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem.
That's why we got commands like d), d{, D, etc. Trying to achieve the goal in one go, without any intermediate redraws.
Can we learn that if you design something for a constrained environment, it will shine when the limitation is lifted?
I would like to select first have a visual feedback of what I selected before taking action on it . Helix and kakuone have got this right .
I often find myself going to visual mode to emulate this.
It's unbeatable when editing files on a remote server in a hurry and from random places that may or may not have good latency and/or bandwidth.
This is 1/2 of explaining why vi family is the GOAT. The remaining explanation is that vi family is the only text editor which is able to be used completely without looking at the keyboard or touching the mouse even once. You can not achieve this if you have to use accord commands which are typically binded to what is selected by mouse. No vim-less text editor can ever provide one-click analog of o command (make a new line under the cursor from wherever column the cursor is at the moment of clicking).
And yes, you can also take my VIM plugin (for Visual Studio) from my cold dead hands.
First thing I install on any IDE/Editor.
That doesn’t mean it’s actually the fastest tool for the real job. Programming is not text editing
The fact that these tools have stood the extreme test of time is really something.
Another person in the lab came over, invited me to his machine and showed me LaTeX in Emacs. We became friends (he a mathematician, I a zoologist). I bought beer; he brought 'computer wisdom'. Thirty-odd years later, those files are still perfectly reproducible. All of my kid's school reports from elementary onwards... LaTeX.
It's hard to overstress how important is longevity in a toolset.
Side rant on Emacs' keybinds: with orderless and vertico (and marginalia and whichkey) it is almost as fast for me to `M-x dir` as to `C-x d`, and in both cases I get a dired buffer. Aaand, `dired` is magic. History also tells me that it is older than Emacs.
\end{rant}
I will make a random comparison to latex vs typst (typesetting software). Both incorporate a programming environment, you can write a program right in your document. The difference is that the tex programming environment is a bit unapproachable and not very similar to other languages you may already know, while typst's equivalent is consistent and more similar to languages you know.
Most editors choke at couple MB, Vis can open 10 Gigabyte text files with zero delay.
Of course, TECO is the explicit ancestor of emacs, as emacs was originally implemented as TECO macros. However, I can't find a paper trail giving similar credit to TECO for vi. That said, istuff<esc> is the same in TECO as it is in vi and TECO (1963) well predated vi (1976). RSTS (along with TECO) was used at Berkeley in 1974 before v6 Unix was installed by Ken Thompson on a sabbatical to his alma mater in 1975. Bill Joy started as a grad student at Berkeley that same year. emacs (1976) wasn't ported to Unix until the 80s.
There's no hard evidence and neither Ken Thompson nor Joy has ever mentioned TECO. So I'm probably wrong.
But I still consider TECO to be the ur editor.
Glass TTY terminals were very new in the early 70's. TECO was primarily written to the "Knight TV" system, which was a fancy MMIO framebuffer array hooked up to a PDP-10 that would multiplex a bunch of displays and keyboards. There really was no "terminal" device per se, it was all software. There were other such devices (the MIT one was actually inspired by a similar system at Stanford), but nothing compatible enough to target an editor.
So basically if you were at MIT you'd understand TECO as the pinnacle of editting . But no one else could use it.
By the time Joy started writing vi, the idea of a "terminal" being a serial-connected device speaking a byte protocol with a handful of reasonable operations (position cursor, clear screen, etc...) had solidified. So a portable editor that would work with multiple devices was feasible. Emacs wouldn't get that for a few years yet.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy.
These fingers of mine learned TECO before they learned vi and then found vi easier to learn as a result. Besides the basic editing syntax, it was a programmable editor, hence the TECO emacs macros.
Funny thing is that as fondly as I remember TECO, I've tried emacs a few times and have always worked my way back to vi/vim. I particularly like neovim now. I like using ex/command mode for doing bulk editing. Of course you can do the same thing in emacs but I've gotten used to it in vi. I remember programming TECO but I don't remember ever doing programmed editing.
A couple years later, ADM-3A's arrived. And so did a TECO macro that turned TECO into a screen editor! Oh, what joy!
Isn't it a amazing that a macro could turn a line editor into a screen editor?
I also used TECO on my H-11 PDP-11 computer.
Also used PFE32 for a while on the Amiga, sad that the source for that never made it out.
[1] I still have Craig Finseth's thesis "A Cookbook for an Emacs" which talks about designing FINE.
The main divergence of note is tab expansion.
[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/doc/BerkeleyDB/ref/am_conf/logrec.ht...
I can't agree more on the beauty of a OS-endorsed scripting language embeddable in every application! Lua might take that role one day...
https://archive.org/details/ADM-3A-User-Reference-Manual-Apr...
(This page, and Figure 1-3 below).
Is the "Controlled Neovim Terminal" supposed to be some bot you are competing with? At first it confused me. Personally I think the first contact with the game would be much more intuitive without it (it can always be introduced later, e.g. if you plan competitions with other humans on randomly generated levels).
There are only two levels now, right? As I equaled both top scores (possibly optimal?)... when more? ;)
Point of order: Minix switched to BSD nvi in 2013 https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...
Not that it matters -- Minix itself hasn't had a commit since 2018 -- but the last five years of its life were spent without Elvis
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2008/R217...
Besides, the plugin michaeljsmith/vim-indent-object defines a new text object ("i"), based on indentation levels.
Huh?
While I suppose that one "could" pay for Emacs, the vast majority of users never have.
Then again, I've only been using Emacs for 45 years, so I'm a newbie. (Yes, I started with the Teco implementation.)
> Joy also claims that most of vi's popularity came from the fact that it was readily available and bundled with BSD, while other editors, like Emacs, could cost hundreds of dollars.
Joy was referring to the late 1970s early 80s here and in the context of making VI available when he created BSD and published it for free. Unix operating systems were not freely available outside academia back then.
It always amaze me that I was only introduced to them in my adult life way after Windows, but still for me they are the definition of what computer is.
So this is not really about (personal) nostalgia.
Also in the age of 8K screens, VR, AI and AI ready computers, a lot of people still use and love vi.
Call me crazy but my guess is there might still be vi users in 50 years.
On the other hand, an Emacs clone (MicroEmacs) actually came with my Amiga 500's bundled extras disk...
Nice read, indeed. Especially the final sentence.
> Also... Emacs sucks!
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17696023 (420 points | Aug 6, 2018 | 259 comments)