[TUHS] Unix taste (Re: terminal - just for fun)

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sun Aug 3 00:00:35 AEST 2014


On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 10:28:59AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> A symptom of why I have always detested emacs and vi. 

EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :)

I like vi, there is a learning curve but what is better?  I tried emacs, it
was too much for my feeble brain.  

I used to carry around a version of xvi (a variant that did buffers so you
could split the screen and see two different parts of a file or two different
files).  I had hacked that so it used \n as a terminator (I think I wacked
things so that \n or \0 were considered terminators) and made it use mmap
to look at the file.  This meant I could fit a ~3MB file in the editor on
a 4MB machine.  It was a pretty big win at the time.

Then we got more memory and then vim came along and I've never looked back.

So Doug, ed?  Or what?  I know some people are fantastic in ed, I used to 
be OK especially when I was going in through a serial port but I can't see
using that for serious programming these days.  Maybe I'm lame.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 



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