<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 5:46 PM Greg A. Woods <<a href="mailto:woods@robohack.ca">woods@robohack.ca</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br>
In the Unix world I think there were versions of full-screen editors<br>
well before "vi" was fully fledged. I used one called "fred -- the<br>
friendly editor", initially IIRC on a PDP 11/60 running 7th Edition Unix<br>
at the University of Calgary, though at the time it was contemporary<br>
with "vi" (1980). It was, I believe, basically also an adaptation of<br>
Unix "ed". It had a modeless "open mode" controlled by the cursor keys<br>
allow one to move about and change text at arbitrary locations on the<br>
screen, though it could also be used in a more line-oriented way like<br>
you would expect a full-screen "ed" to work -- in this mode it still<br>
maintained a full screen's worth of context and one could "page" up and<br>
down in the document being edited but typically one inserted/appended<br>
lines in a modal manner, or moved or deleted or ran other commands on a<br>
line or block of lines at a time.<br></blockquote><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">fred was original released for v6. FWIW: I think it came out of Cornell. I know we had it at CMU in 1977/78 and ran it on Perkin Elmer Fox terminals mostly, since that is what most of the UNIX boxes we had.</span> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I'm pretty sure<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> that</span> I have the sources somewhere. <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> There was nothing like termcap; it was hard-coded to the terminal being used in some manner, probably reading something static like /etc/ttys and knowing the site's set up.</span> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">But a</span>s you said<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">,</span> </span>it was<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> small enough to run on 11/40 class UNIX systems </span>which helpful<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> since <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">40s and 34s were</span></span> what<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> we had the most. We did not have vi nor emacs in UNIX-lan<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">d</span> which was still PDP-11's<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> (EMACS was on the PDP-10s).</span></span></div><div><br></div></div></div>