Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 08:19:16 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Cc: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk, andreas@knobel.gun.de, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /stand/ee Message-ID: <199605210619.IAA09246@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960520210951.1831A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> from John Fieber at "May 20, 96 10:27:09 pm"
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(Moved to -chat)
As John Fieber wrote:
I fully agree with John's points stated (``the one true editor''
vs. a useful editor for small maintenance tasks).
> I'm not one to bring change for the sake of change, and at this
> point I wouldn't dream of proposing to remove vi from the core
> distribution. However, it is equally shortsighted to keep
> tradition for sake of tradition. Vi has stubbornly ignored all
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> that the last 15 or so years of human computer interaction
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> research has discovered, and the population of users who have no
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> desire to invest the time to learn a cranky old editor is only
> going to rise.
It even did this by time of its own creation. :)
Quoting Peter H. Salus' ``A Quarter Century of Unix'', pp. 139 ff.,
typos are mine:
<quote>
[...] They took an editor call *em* that had been developed by
Coulouris at Queen Mary College, London, and developed the
line-at-a-time editor ex. Coulouris had been the first recipient of
Unix (Version 4) in the UK, in late 1973. He told me:
I developed *em* at QMC in the autumn of 1975, to enable us to
exploit more effectively some vdu terminals that we had recently
acquired. [...]
Seeing *em* was probably what alerted Bill Joy and the BSD people to
the possibility of a screen editor for Unix. If I hadn't developed
*em* and visited Berkeley with it, early versions of BSD Unix
probably wouldn't have contained a screen editor. This can be
chalked up as a small example of a reverse flow of ideas across the
Atlantic in the Unix story.
<my emphasis -- joerg>
Unfortunately, *vi* didn't pick up some of the human interface
principles that were embedded in *em*. At QMC we had already
concluded that modal interaction was a bad idea, and I had gone to
some lengths to ensure that the interaction in *em* didn't involve
more than one meaning for any key. This principle was badly
violated in *vi* with its insert and edit modes.
</my emphasis>
</quote>
--
cheers, J"org
joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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