[TUHS] screen editors

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Wed Jan 8 02:30:53 AEST 2020


Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I'm a vi guy to this day.  Love it.

In the summer of '82 I did some contract programming at Southern Bell
on a PDP-11 running USG Unix 4.0.  It had a screen editor called 'se'
that I only ever saw there, written somewhere in the Bell System and
squeezed to run on an -11.  Anyone know anything about it?

Unrelated, Georgia Tech had the 'se' screen editor as part of the
Software Tools Subsystem, based on the 'ed' in the Software Tools book.
This was later ported to Unix. I modified that code to use curses/termlib
and posted it to USENET. It's been updated and is available from
https://github.com/se-editor/se and http://se-editor.org is the home
page. (Thomas Cort IIRC did that work.)

What's funny is that in doing the work to get 'se' running on Georgia
Tech's Vax, I had to learn vi.  By the time I was done, vi had become
my main editor and had burned itself into my finger's ROMs.

Arnold


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