Werner LEMBERG wrote on 2003-03-18 08:54 UTC:
> > Mined was the first text mode editor with Unicode support.
^^^^^^^^^
> Hmm, are you sure? The `sam' editor from the Plan 9 OS has `Unicode
> support' since a very long time (more than 10 years IIRC, before
> Unicode 1.0 was out), this is, it uses 16bit character codes natively.
AFAIK, Sam didn't run inside 9term, it sat on top of the same libXg
libraries that were also used by 9term. I believe the same is the case
for Acme. I don't know any editors earlier than Mined that run inside a
UTF-8 VT100 terminal emulator, in other words, that run in "text mode".
Mined was certainly in my memory the first editor to run inside the
UTF-8 modes of xterm or the Linux console.
http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~matty/9term/
The Pike/Thompson paper in the USENIX Winter 1993 proceedings only
mentions in passing in the acknowledgement section (page 50, left
column, bottom) that "Bob Flandrena converted most of the standard tools
to UTF", without elaborating on whether that contained any text-mode
editor. Rob Pike's short biography at the end of the paper mentions
apart from that he won the 1980 Olympic silver medal in archery also
that "he is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses
cursor addressing.". This doesn't suggest that the Plan9 team were much
into text-mode editors.
Therefore, I believe Mined's claim of "first text mode editor with
Unicode support" remains unchallenged.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
