Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Sid Boyce <sboyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lonn Dugan wrote:
> Since earliest days of Unix -- vi was/is a screen editor; ed, a line at a
> time tool. (see edlin in earliest PC DOS) Wouldn't you love to have earliest
> edition of Brian W. Kernighan/Rob Pike "The Unix Programming Environment" or
> Brian W. Kernighan/Dennis M. Ritchie "The C Programming Language"
>
> Somewhere around here is a Ken Thompson masterpiece - and to clear up an
> earlier item: Ken Thompson, in 1969, began writing the Unix kernel (a small
> general purpose time sharing-system) on  salvaged DEC PDP-7 store room junk.
> By 1970, C development was started on a PDP-11, and by 1973, the kernel had
> been rewritten in C by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson and compiled with
> Dennis M. Ritchie's C Compiler. In 1974 Unix was first licensed to
> universities "for educational purposes."
>
> Lonn C. Dugan
For many years it was said that the single most thing that held Unix 
back was the lack of a decent editor, simply they were all supremely 
lousy. I've used vi for over 23 years on a regular basis and I don't 
think much of it or any of the other Unix editors designed for octupuses 
and trained concert pianists - the likes of Joe. Then I met 
YEEEEUUUUUKKK!!!! "ksh -o vi" in Solaris, an example of how to waste 
brain cells, so I stuck two fingers up to learning that rubbish, at 
least bash and arrow keys made life more tolerable and I installed bash 
as my first act on a Solaris box if allowed by the customer.
I gave a demo of SPF/PC (A version of the IBM MVS editor ported to DOS) 
to our local Linux group about 14 years ago to demonstrate what a decent 
editor was like and I think they understood my loathing of Unix 
editors/edlin that looked like they were written as a project at the 
school for retarded programmers. I was taught SPF in about 10 minutes 
and I've taught SPF to others also within 10 minutes, it being as 
intuitive as you'll ever get.
I use vi for simple stuff, insert/delete/replace and cooledit if I ever 
have any substantial editing to be done.
Regards
Sid.

<STUFF DELETED>

--
Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, licensed Private Pilot
Retired IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support 
Specialist
Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks