[ih] cut and paste

[Carsten Bormann]

On 8. Aug 2023, at 01:43, Guy Almes via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>  I wonder whether the Unix culture (referring to the vi editor) is sort of a third 'New Jersey' locus.

East coast UNIX had “ed”, which was workable, but tedious, a bit like SOS (if my faint memory of a thing called that way serves me), but with tons of minimalist genius added.

Berkeley UNIX (West Coast!) extended this, leading to Bill Joy's extended ed clone “ex”.

“ex” later added a visual (screen editing) mode, no doubt inspired by the marvelous ^R mode (“real-time edit”) of TECO, but with pinky-saving modal commands instead of primarily using control characters.

The “ex” command to enter its visual mode was “vi”.
At some point typing “ex” in the shell and then “vi” in “ex” became tedious, too, so a version of “ex” was built that started in visual mode when called with “vi” as argv[0].
So “vi” was just a hard link to “ex” that was called by the obvious name “vi”, to save entering one command.

(I’m still trying to get over the colleague who pronounced “vi” like “six”.
No, roman numerals were not the reason for the name :-)
I also remember that we regularly gave out the assignment to write a screen editor in a week in PDP-11 assembly code in a mandatory course in the CS curriculum — you didn’t get a diploma if you couldn’t do this.
A friend and I had written a screen editor in C in about two days a year or so earlier.
Termcap would have been the hard part, which we didn’t use in that prototype.)

Grüße, Carsten