[TUHS] End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

[Larry McVoy]

Not really the same.  :sp splits your window in half and puts you in 
two different windows on the same file.  Each window, in vim, is full
on vi, you can do :e fillename and now that window is on that file.

But that is far less useful than having two windows into the same
file where the mods to each window go to the same file.  Think 
looking at code that has the structs at the top of the file and you
need to wack a struck and wack the code that uses that struct.
Quite pleasant.

I'm not sure but maybe xvi is where I saw this first and I only saw
because I wacked xvi to use \0 and \n as end of line because that way
I could change it to mmap the input file and it didn't have to parse
it into internal malloced lines.  Which was a huge win on 4MB Suns,
I could xvi a "huge" (for then) log file.  I was a performance guy,
I've xvi-ed a lot of big log files.

But I think xvi could split.  And once I could do that I never looked
back, all the emacs people were like "can you have multiple windows"
and I was "yup" and it is still simple, still vi.

Says the person who forced himself to live in emacs for a year and
still hated it.  Not trying to start an editor war, more saying, my
brain works well with vi, doesn't work well with emacs, emacs is 
fine for people who's brain works that way.

Same with nvi vs vim.  My brain works pretty well with vim, I don't
use 90 to 99% of what it does past basic vi, but the parts I do use I
really like.  I do delete the system .vimrc or whatever it is that does
color highlighting, I hate that crap.

I like the split windows, I like that I can tell my kid to do

vim file
:sp
:help

and he figures it out from there.

I also like that I've been carrying around this .exrc for close to 40 years
and it just works:

map # :.,$
map @ :1,.
map , !}fmt
map g 
map! 
 
set redraw ai aw terse 
set sections=uhshSHNH
set paragraphs=PSPETSTEFSFEKSKECSCERSREDSDEIPNPLPPPTLABAIAELIB1B2HH
set ts=8 sw=4
set shell=/bin/sh
set showmode
set textwidth=1000
set vb

I think the # and @ came from the BDS C editor, "," came from watching
Udi Manber do that and I went WTF? ^A is because I set sw to 4, a lot of
the rest is troff.

40 years later, it still works, credit to vim for maintaining backwards
compat while moving the vi editor forward.  No offense to Keith but nvi
didn't really move vi forward much, that I know of, it made it sort of
bug for bug compat with Joys vi.  Which I never understood, was Joys
vi not open sourced?  I always wondered why Keith did all that work and
then left it in the 1980s.

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 05:33:35PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> :E [filename] in nvi does the same (or similar; I rarely use vim).
> Though IMHO the Rand Editor did a better job of multiple windows.
> 
> 
> > On Jul 17, 2025, at 1:03???PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > :sp[lit]
> > 
> > is enough to keep me in vim.  That's a killer feature.
> > 
> > On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 12:06:03PM -0500, Will Senn wrote:
> >> I heart ed and it's cousin, vi. After poring through the v6 manual and
> >> tutorial, I started loving ed. I ditched vim a while back and embraced nvi
> >> (berkeley's modern basic vi/ex). Very simple, very basic, extremely
> >> powerful, none of the bloat - basically heirloom with a few refinements.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Will
> >> 
> >> On 7/16/25 06:13, Cameron M????e??l Tyre via TUHS wrote:
> >>> Ah, rabbit holes. Dangerous things. I went down the ed rabbit hole around a month ago and no sign of me finding my way back out any time soon.
> >>> 
> >>> I got obsessed with getting ed running on every device I have including my phones and then the big rabbit hole off that first one was learning how to use it properly and to the fullest of its abilities. That'll take a while.
> >>> 
> >>> My library of ed related publications is getting so big its likely what's blocking the exit to the rabbit hole. On the plus side it has sharpened my typing skills, improved my patience and I I've learned to work out for myself what I've done to cause ed to say ?, instead of just typing h+Enter.
> >>> 
> >>> As rabbit holes go, it's been stimulating so far and I could be stuck in worse places.
> >>> 
> >>> Have a safe one!
> >>> 
> >>> Cameron
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>> -------- Original Message --------
> >>> On 16/07/2025 01:01, Luther Johnson <luther.johnson at makerlisp.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>>> I just noticed that algorithm and logarithm just have a couple of
> >>>> letters transposed from each other. So that's the kind of rabbit hole I
> >>>> get lost in most days.
> > 
> > -- 
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat