On Friday 11 November 2005 08:33 am, Bjorn Tore Sund wrote:
Original vi is a front-end to ex, not ed. This is one of the things that made it the one full-screen editor which could work on documents much bigger than what you could hold in RAM, it was/is actually a line-editor which acted like a file editor.
Things were a lot more fun in those days...
When I began my computer science program in the early 90s I was expected to access systems running such editors (the one I remember was kind of a hybrid ed/vi thing with a single input line, but full screen display) through a DOS tty emulation. No one seemed to know how it worked, nor how it was supposed to work. So, add to the intuitive, user friendly nature of ed the coherence of using it through a dialup connection with a terminal emulation program that remaps the control characters, and documentation that describes using the editor from a real VT100. You want fun, you got fun. These days my only problem is recognizing which interface I'm in. Switching between Mathematica(Emacs on steroids), Emacs, Vi(in a pinch), Mozilla, Konqueror, KMail, bash, etc. can really get confusing after coding for about 18 hours. I think my favorite is C-w. In Emacs it's a cut into the kill ring, in just about everything else it's a close window. I've closed a lot of windows that way. And then there's C-z...M-S-Tab...grumble... Steven