[TUHS] screen editors

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 07 Jan 2020 14:57:40 -0500 Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> McIlroy:
> > [vi] was so excesssive right from the start that I refused to use it.
> > Sam was the first screen editor that I deemed worthwhile, and I
> > still use it today.
>
> Paulsen:
> > my sam build is more than 2 times bigger than Gunnar Ritter's vi
> > (or Steve Kirkendall's elvis) and even bigger than Bram Moolenaar's vim.
>
> % wc -c /bin/vi bin/sam bin/samterm
> 1706152 /bin/vi
>  112208 bin/sam
>  153624 bin/samterm
> These mumbers are from Red Hat Linux.
> The 6:1 discrepancy is understated because
> vi is stripped and the sam files are not.
> All are 64-bit, dynamically linked.

A source code comparison
$ cd 2bsd/src/ex		# this is a snapshot of May 9, 1979
$ wc *.c | tail -1
   17176   56138  331865 total

$ cd $PLAN9/src/cmd/		# what works today
$ wc {sam,samterm}/*.[hc] | tail -1
   11366   27236  201666 total

$ cd /usr/src/contrib/nvi	# what works today
$ wc */*.[ch] | tail -1
   51978  202926 1297043 total	# actual count is slightly smaller

I use nvi or acme. Haven't touched sam in ages. Having taught
my fingertips nvi 37 years back, I can edit the fastest in it.
But some things are easier in acme + with its multiple panes
and smaller antialiased fonts it makes much better use of a
retina display. iterm/screen + nvi can't match that.

Until about 95 I used nvi & the Rand Editor (later Dave Yost's
version). The latter was the easiest to use + it did multiple
editing windows much before nvi or vim.