Re: nvi for serious hacking
At 1:25 PM -0600 10/17/05, M. Warner Losh wrote: In message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: :vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer :history. Are you sure about this? I was using screen oriented editors over a 1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive BH-100. Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast. So I did some digging. vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system to handle. These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984. It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing features to TECO[2]. In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO. I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi efforts. Other editors may have influanced Carl. Who knows. I arrived in RPI in 1975. In December of 1975, we were just trying out a mainframe timesharing system called Michigan Terminal System, or MTS, from the university of Michigan. The editor was called 'edit', and was a Command Language Subsystem (CLS) in MTS. That meant it had a command language of it's one. One of the sub-commands in edit was 'visual', for visual mode. It only worked on IBM 3270-style terminals, but it was screen-based and cursor-based. The editor would put a bunch of fields up on the screen, some of which you could modify and some you couldn't. The text of your file was in the fields you could type over. Once you finished with whatever changes you wanted to make on that screen, you would hit one of 15 or 20 interrupt-generating keys on the 3270 terminal (12 of which were programmable function keys, in a keypad with a layout similar to the numeric keypad on current keyboards). The 3270 terminal would then tell the mainframe which fields on the screen had been modified, and what those modifications were. The mainframe would update the file based on that info. I *THINK* the guy who wrote that was ... Bill Joy -- as a student at UofM. I can't find any confirmation of that, though. The closest I can come is the web page at http://www.jefallbright.net/node/3218 , which is an article written by Bill. In it he mentions: By 1967, MTS was up and running on the newly arrived 360/67, supporting 30 to 40 simultaneous users. ... By the time I arrived as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1971, MTS and Merit were successful and stable systems. By that point, a multiprocessor system running MTS could support a hundred simultaneous interactive users, ... But he doesn't happen to mention anything about editors or visual mode. My memory of his connection to MTS's visual-mode could very well be wrong, since I didn't come along until after visual-mode already existed. I just remember his name coming up in later discussions. However, I also think there was someone named Victor who was part of the story of 3270 support in MTS. And Dave Twyver at University of British Columbia was the guy who wrote the 3270 DSR (Device Support Routine), as mentioned on the page at: http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/mtswiki-index.php/Dave%20Twyver In any case, I *am* sure that MTS had a visual editor in December of 1975, which puts before vi if vi started in 1976. Unfortunately, all of the documentation of MTS lived in the EBCDIC world, and pretty much disappeared when MTS did (in the late 1990's). In my case, the first visual editor that worked under Unix was DED from the Australian Distro. it only worked on a VT100, but that's was what i had :-), then came emacs, so im one of the few that doesn't know vi. danny ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvi for serious hacking
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 01:25:32PM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: In message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: : vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer : history. Are you sure about this? I was using screen oriented editors over a 1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive BH-100. Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast. So I did some digging. vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system to handle. These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984. It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing features to TECO[2]. In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO. I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi efforts. Other editors may have influanced Carl. Who knows. You're probably right. I didn't know the diff between a computer and a washing machine until I was past 30; found out in 1977 and haven't looked back! My first editor was ed on V6, followed by ex, followed by vi circa June, 1978. Bill used to haul around print outs of the src to vi and csh (c). I'd be hacking in FORTRAN and Bill would be working in things that we lightyears beyond me. Ideas inspire new ideas; concepts build upon one another. This integration and cross-fertilization helps all of us. OT, but that is why I see software patents as being not only selfish but self-defeating in the longer scope of things. Let me amend my prev-statement to read that vi was among the first screen/cursor-based editors gary -- Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.thought.org Public service Unix ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvi for serious hacking
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 02:46:56AM +0400, Oleg Petrov wrote: Hello, FreeBSD people. First thing to mention is that I'm very experienced Emacs user. I was using it for 4-5 years or so. But sometime ago i began to feel myself so uncomfortable with it for some reasons: first, i use many different systems and emacs isn't default application for FreeBSD or any other *BSD\Linux distribution. Second, remote machines aren't powerful enough to start Emacs fast. I tried many small Emacs clones like jed, joe, uemacs and several others i just can't remember. But for different reasons i disliked all of them. Later I noticed default `nvi' editor, that has some nice features: it comes with FreeBSD by default and according to documentation it has powerful editing mechanism. So, my question goes to all FreeBSD hackers who uses `nvi' as their general editor. Is it possible to do serious hacking with it? More accurate: I'd say s/nvi/vim (see http://www.vim.org/) if you want to really do everything with your Vi. Marc ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvi for serious hacking
In message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: : vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer : history. Are you sure about this? I was using screen oriented editors over a 1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive BH-100. Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast. So I did some digging. vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system to handle. These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984. It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing features to TECO[2]. In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO. I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi efforts. Other editors may have influanced Carl. Who knows. Warner [1] http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html [2] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsHistory ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvi for serious hacking
At 1:25 PM -0600 10/17/05, M. Warner Losh wrote: In message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: : vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer : history. Are you sure about this? I was using screen oriented editors over a 1200 baud dialup line in 1977 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E on a Behive BH-100. Seems like one year from vi to being deployed at Berkeley to a completely different video editor being deployed on a completely different os in the schools that I used this in seems fast. So I did some digging. vi started in about 1976[1] as a project that grew out of the frustration taht a 200 line Pascal program was too big for the system to handle. These are based on recollections of Bill Joy in 1984. It appears that starting in 1972 Carl Mikkelson added screen editing features to TECO[2]. In 1974 Richard Stallman added macros to TECO. I don't know if Carl's work was the first, but it pre-dates the vi efforts. Other editors may have influanced Carl. Who knows. I arrived in RPI in 1975. In December of 1975, we were just trying out a mainframe timesharing system called Michigan Terminal System, or MTS, from the university of Michigan. The editor was called 'edit', and was a Command Language Subsystem (CLS) in MTS. That meant it had a command language of it's one. One of the sub-commands in edit was 'visual', for visual mode. It only worked on IBM 3270-style terminals, but it was screen-based and cursor-based. The editor would put a bunch of fields up on the screen, some of which you could modify and some you couldn't. The text of your file was in the fields you could type over. Once you finished with whatever changes you wanted to make on that screen, you would hit one of 15 or 20 interrupt-generating keys on the 3270 terminal (12 of which were programmable function keys, in a keypad with a layout similar to the numeric keypad on current keyboards). The 3270 terminal would then tell the mainframe which fields on the screen had been modified, and what those modifications were. The mainframe would update the file based on that info. I *THINK* the guy who wrote that was ... Bill Joy -- as a student at UofM. I can't find any confirmation of that, though. The closest I can come is the web page at http://www.jefallbright.net/node/3218 , which is an article written by Bill. In it he mentions: By 1967, MTS was up and running on the newly arrived 360/67, supporting 30 to 40 simultaneous users. ... By the time I arrived as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1971, MTS and Merit were successful and stable systems. By that point, a multiprocessor system running MTS could support a hundred simultaneous interactive users, ... But he doesn't happen to mention anything about editors or visual mode. My memory of his connection to MTS's visual-mode could very well be wrong, since I didn't come along until after visual-mode already existed. I just remember his name coming up in later discussions. However, I also think there was someone named Victor who was part of the story of 3270 support in MTS. And Dave Twyver at University of British Columbia was the guy who wrote the 3270 DSR (Device Support Routine), as mentioned on the page at: http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/mtswiki-index.php/Dave%20Twyver In any case, I *am* sure that MTS had a visual editor in December of 1975, which puts before vi if vi started in 1976. Unfortunately, all of the documentation of MTS lived in the EBCDIC world, and pretty much disappeared when MTS did (in the late 1990's). -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nvi for serious hacking
Hello, FreeBSD people. First thing to mention is that I'm very experienced Emacs user. I was using it for 4-5 years or so. But sometime ago i began to feel myself so uncomfortable with it for some reasons: first, i use many different systems and emacs isn't default application for FreeBSD or any other *BSD\Linux distribution. Second, remote machines aren't powerful enough to start Emacs fast. I tried many small Emacs clones like jed, joe, uemacs and several others i just can't remember. But for different reasons i disliked all of them. Later I noticed default `nvi' editor, that has some nice features: it comes with FreeBSD by default and according to documentation it has powerful editing mechanism. So, my question goes to all FreeBSD hackers who uses `nvi' as their general editor. Is it possible to do serious hacking with it? More accurate: * What programming features it support? (Does it have something like etags? Does it have interface to gdb? And such other things..) * Is it possible to use it comfortable with Dvorak layout? (I noticed some bindings that relies on keys arrangement) * How to setup it to standard FreeBSD C code indentation? And don't use tabs as well. It's hard choice for me to switch old good Emacs to something new, so please give me your opinions. I'm not subscribed to list, so please CC me. Thanks! ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvi for serious hacking
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 02:46:56AM +0400, Oleg Petrov wrote: Hello, FreeBSD people. First thing to mention is that I'm very experienced Emacs user. I was using it for 4-5 years or so. But sometime ago i began to feel myself so uncomfortable with it for some reasons: first, i use many different systems and emacs isn't default application for FreeBSD or any other *BSD\Linux distribution. Second, remote machines aren't powerful enough to start Emacs fast. I tried many small Emacs clones like jed, joe, uemacs and several others i just can't remember. But for different reasons i disliked all of them. Later I noticed default `nvi' editor, that has some nice features: it comes with FreeBSD by default and according to documentation it has powerful editing mechanism. So, my question goes to all FreeBSD hackers who uses `nvi' as their general editor. Is it possible to do serious hacking with it? More accurate: * What programming features it support? (Does it have something like etags? Does it have interface to gdb? And such other things..) * Is it possible to use it comfortable with Dvorak layout? (I noticed some bindings that relies on keys arrangement) * How to setup it to standard FreeBSD C code indentation? And don't use tabs as well. It's hard choice for me to switch old good Emacs to something new, so please give me your opinions. I'm not subscribed to list, so please CC me. vi was the first screen/cursor-based editor in computer history. Written by Bill Joy when he was in his early 20's. I've been using vi almost since Bill released his first draft; my fingers know it by default. And even after almost 30years there are still things I don't know. Nutshell, I've hacked hundreds of thousands of line using vi; millions of words of prose. I've used *tags, debuggers, and other tools with it. Have tried *emacs; just can't get the hang of it. With tools like [n]vi and ctags, plus a debugger you've got your own IDE. Since you've learned emacs, you'll learn vi in a flash. gary kline -- Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.thought.org Public service Unix ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
