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Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor
- g3orge 15y agoVim is my favorite editor ever, and I'm not gonna change it for the world.
- hamax 15y agoI started using it few months ago and I love it. My usage patterns are very basic and still I can write code faster then in any visual editor. In our office 3/10 engineers are using vim as primary tool.
- martincmartin 15y agoThis is from 2003. Can we put [2003] in the title?
- frabcus 15y agoMy instinct is to agree... However, I don't think "news" means what it used to any more. Since there are so many sources of information it doesn't mean "new to the world" any more, it instead means "new to the reader". In that sense, that it is from another year is fairly irrelevant.
- bcrescimanno 15y agoActually, it's from 2003 but the entirety of the interview is from 1999. I had that issue of Linux Magazine and I remember reading the interview back then. Sad that it took me over 10 years to really dig into vim after reading about the history of vi.
- ez77 15y agoIn case anybody is interested, here is the link to the 1999 interview: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/349/ http://www.linux-mag.com/id/349/
- Jach 15y agoA nice bit of history. Of course, even more interesting bits on the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi#Creation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi#Creation > Many of the ideas in ex's visual mode (a.k.a. vi) were taken from other software that existed at the time. According to Bill Joy,[2] inspiration for vi's visual mode came from the Bravo editor, which was a bimodal editor. In an interview about vi's origins, Joy said:[2] > > A lot of the ideas for the screen editing mode were stolen from a Bravo manual I surreptitiously looked at and copied. Dot is really the double-escape from Bravo, the redo command. Most of the stuff was stolen. There were some things stolen from ed—we got a manual page for the Toronto version of ed, which I think Rob Pike had something to do with. We took some of the regular expression extensions out of that. And fortunately for those of us in the modern world, we have vim.
- meepmorp 15y agoWhat I find sad about that anecdote is that he fully and freely admits stealing software features from other places to make a more serviceable piece of software, and that doing so now and owning up to it would get you an automatic loss in a patent suit.* * Yes, I know this is a bit of an oversimplification.
- roel_v 15y ago...and this is why we can't have nice things: an article about a part of computing history immediately turns into ideologically-inspired dead horse flogging, complete with an admission that the argument made actually bullshit - but hey, let's post anyway.
- guelo 15y ago... and this is why we can't have nice things: when people point out how the computing world's ability to innovate is being destroyed it is immediately attacked as supposed ideology. This attitude, that we can't talk about controversial topics among nice company, is what allows our rights to be stolen.
- 15y ago
- jamesrcole 15y ago...I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. ...the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Seems a good example of how constraints can produce innovation.
- StavrosK 15y agoWell, no, slowness was the problem they were trying to solve. It wasn't incidental.
- jamesrcole 15y agoYes, my point was that it was a product of facing that constraint.
- zerostar07 15y agoUnderstandable why it's the most fond of his achievements, i spend more time thinking about it more than any of his other inventions. You get a glimpse of that old world he's talking about when you use it over a slow data connection on your smartphone.
- dextorious 15y ago"""i use it more than any of his other inventions""" I think you use the TCP/IP stack (or one inspired by his) even more often -- but it's not an end user thing.
- zerostar07 15y agoyou 're absolutely correct
- billybob 15y agoYou use vi on a smartphone? I love vim, but I think it would be excruciating without a full keyboard.
- z92 15y agoI thought vim was a better choice, specially when you don't have a full keyboard. No need for arrow keys or Home, End.
- lucian1900 15y agoSmartphones with physical keyboards are sweet.
- zerostar07 15y agoOnly when something is broken, it's actually more usable on a phone terminal than any other editor i can think of.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoMy last three phones have had qwerty keyboards. The Nokia E90, a G1 and now a HTC Desire Z. Typing on them is so much easier than using a touch screen. I regularly tap out emails and use ssh and vi on mine.
- 16s 15y agovi is the lowest common denominator among *nix text editors. It's a huge advantage to know how to use it.
- zerostar07 15y agono, in the sense that most other editors do not share its features. it's ubiquitous though.
- dextorious 15y agoActually it's not the "lowest common denominator" --perhaps you meant something like "the most prevalent". It both has lots of features other editor's don't have, and implements most features differently, so it's not like it's a subset of any other editor. Vi is only the lowest common denominator of the vi-clones family of editors (Vim et al).
- botker 15y agoI believe that award goes to ed, the standard UNIX text editor.
- dextorious 15y agoTrue.
- pessimizer 15y agoYes, it is, in the sense that it is a common factor across every *nix system that you may need to deal with. Emacs isn't going to be everywhere.
- tomjen3 15y agoVi isn't everywhere either, though it may be on more systems than Emacs. But almost any system is going to have ed installed.
- damoncali 15y ago
- nezumi 15y agoBut that world does still exist: I often find myself ssh'd into a desktop tmux session, via my laptop tethered to my phone's internet connection. In that situation, I am highly appreciative of vi's 300 baud history.
- dasil003 15y agoYes, bandwidth is always better, but latency spikes are real, even when sitting in your office you can get routing issues or congestion or who knows what making things very frustrating for anything that needs rapid visual feedback.
- ntkachov 15y agoHN is also an interesting community because of the fact that we all have relatively fast connections. Bungie (guys who made Halo) found out that if you want to be accessible to 99% of connections you need to design around 8kb/s speeds which from what I understand is about 4000baud (see edit). Edit: I was under the impression that 1 baud = 2bps because I saw this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates . I was wrong.
- ordinary 15y agoI just took a couple of minutes to figure out how baud translates to kbps. Turns out, it doesn't. Back in The Day, 300 baud translated to 300 bits per second, but "as modem technology advanced, compression and other techniques were able to get higher bit per second transfer rates without a corresponding linear increase in state changes. Baud became an outdated term because it wasn’t able to accurately and proportionately express transfer rates, so bps became the standard."[0] There is some more in-depth information about what "as modem technology advanced" means on Wikipedia[1]. Interesting stuff. _____ [0] http://www.tech-faq.com/kbps.html http://www.tech-faq.com/kbps.html [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud
- jaylevitt 15y ago
- dextorious 15y agoSo, besides democracy, theater, abstract math and the debt crisis, we Greeks also (sorta) gave vi to the world!
- sgt 15y agoBill Joy is greek? Perhaps Joy is short for Joyalakinakis?
- swah 15y agoNope, america again.
- zerostar07 15y agoyes yes, wanna repay some debt now?
- StavrosK 15y agoGeorge Coulouris.
- dextorious 15y agoNo, he's American alright. Talking about George Coulouris, mid-way and in the end of TFA, and also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Coulouris_(computer_scientist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Coulouris_(computer_scie... """He was instrumental in the development of ICL's Content Addressable File Store (CAFS) and he developed em, the Unix editor, which inspired Bill Joy to write vi."""
- sgt 15y agoFound his photo; http://members.fortunecity.com/tylorhan/faces3/george_coulouris.jpg http://members.fortunecity.com/tylorhan/faces3/george_coulou...
- pschlump 15y agoThat world is not completely gone! I use VI to connect to amazon AWS servers over a satellite link. It is faster than 1200 baud but with horrible latency. VI is the only editor that works.
- pschlump 15y agoRight now I am sitting on a Sailboat in the Bahamas.
- lhaussknecht 15y agoAnd reading HN with Lynx?
- jamesgeck0 15y agoHow many monitors do you have? (: http://secretgeek.net/jat_vc.asp http://secretgeek.net/jat_vc.asp
- nathanwdavis 15y agoYou really should get off HN and enjoy the sea.
- Marwy 15y agoMaybe he did? Maybe he has been enjoying the sea for the past 12 hours? Jesus, you really don't have better things to do than making assumptions and sharing them with people?
- apu 15y agoPlease be nice.
- pschlump 15y agoTomorrow I will swim with fish. Today it is stormy and we are safely tucked in a protected harbor. I program when the weather is bad and swim when it is good.
- sgt 15y agoAs I read the article, "Joy leaves a lasting legacy " gave me a small shock, causing me to fire up Bill Joy's wikipedia page to ensure myself that he hasn't passed away. Phew, thankfully he's fine. Too many great people are dying these last few years.
- StavrosK 15y agoGreat people are always dying...
- verisimilitude 15y agoYou aren't imagining that. With the increase in population and the number of people classified as celebrities, in the future, we'll see what Kottke called "An abundance of death"[0]. [0]: http://kottke.org/09/08/an-abundance-of-death http://kottke.org/09/08/an-abundance-of-death
- StavrosK 15y ago> Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. Are you kidding me? Only vi is much faster than I can think. I still have to wait for Eclipse. Hence, I use vi, because there's too much friction in waiting for my editor. I find that I miss lots of the convenience features of Eclipse, but when I can alrady get productive in vim by the time Eclipse has loaded, it's too easy to just work in vim.
- sjs 15y agoEclipse is a dog. If you compare vim to other text editors such as BBEdit, TextMate, Emacs, Gedit, Sublime Text 2, e, etc. then your argument falls flat on its face.
- nostrademons 15y agoThe nice thing about vi is its ubiquity. I can ssh into basically every UNIX system in the world and be reasonably certain that vi will be available. The same can't be said for BBEdit, TextMate, EMacs, Gedit, etc. I picked up vi because I was stuck doing development over SSH from my college's public computer lab when my PC died. I stayed because once I'd learned the keystrokes, it really was a pretty decent editor. I think that Eclipse/TextMate/Gedit/etc. have some nice points and are definitely better in some respects (like, say, visual presentation), but vi is Good Enough and available basically everywhere.
- ams6110 15y agoYeah I've been am emacs user for decades but I know just enough vi to be able to navigate and edit config files, for this very reason. You always have vi. I probably should learn a bit more.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago> The nice thing about vi is its ubiquity. I could name a very long list of things that are ubiquitous, yet are not nice at all.
- MPSimmons 15y agoAnd yet, it still works great.
- saddino 15y agoAs someone who was limited to 300 baud for learning UNIX and C, I actually preferred Joy's ex over vi. I found that I could type ahead very quickly and just let the edits scroll in as they were echoed from the mainframe. Watching the edits cascade in a scroll made much more sense to me than a slowly updating vi screen.
- zobzu 15y agovi(m) rock my world. If that means I don't exist anymore, there's only one ascii art I can think of for Mr Bill Joy. .i. (o.o) .i.
- funkah 15y agoMaybe that's why I feel so crazy whenever I try to use it. We can have bitmapped interfaces now, no need for the arcaneness of vi and similar editors.
- blhack 15y ago"Hammers were invented for a world that doesn't exist anymore". "Manual screwdrivers were invented for a world that doesn't exist anymore" "Chisels were invented for a world that doesn't exist anymore". Etc. The mere fact that people are still using vi[m] is evidence that this author is wrong.
- quattrofan 15y agoI wish the title of the article was "Joy leaves Sun", dual meanings are always more fun.
- enobrev 15y agoMy favorite quote in the article: > "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?" > No. It took a long time. Nearly every day I come to this site and skim past headlines resembling "Check out my weekend project!" or "Look at the awesome business idea I put together in 12 hours!!" While I understand there can be a great sense of accomplishment to come up with an idea and pull it together in a short amount of time, I far more appreciate projects that people have dedicated months and years of their lives to. Forget weekend whims. Dedicate yourself to an interesting project for 6 months or a year and then tell me what you've learned. You may suddenly find yourself in high enough demand that you're no longer able to spare the weekends to waste on something to show off on HN.
- dwwoelfel 15y agoMany of these "weekend" projects turn into long-term projects. The thing that gets launched initially helps the developer guage interest before he spends too much time on the project.
- elemeno 15y agoI'd have a hard time believing that 'many' of these weekend projects go on to become a long-term project. To me at least, they seem like people taking a shotgun approach to starting projects and hoping that one of them will stick and become popular without having had to expend much effort on it. Interesting problems take more than a weekend to solve.
- dwwoelfel 15y agoInteresting problems take more than a weekend to solve. They take a weekend to discover. Edit: For an example, see Gumroad, which was launched on HN as a weekend project[1], then improved and got Techcrunch coverage months later[2].
- InclinedPlane 15y agoWhat's the best way to find out if an idea is worthwhile? Spend a month working on it or a weekend?
- Yuioup 15y agoI beg to differ! I have several clients with which I connect to remotely via Windows Terminal Server or VNC. I usually have to connect to via the webbrowser by opening a link and then the session is opened. I usually have no option to change the performance or quality options. We have a fast connection here but our clients have ADSL. Yes that's right, the A stands for really slow uploads. I don't know about you but have you ever tried using Notepad/Notepad++/UltraEdit via a slow internet connection with all the options on full blast (32-bit color, themes, etc ..)? I'm so glad that I can download PortableVim and run it off the "My Documents" folder and quickly do my editing without being too bothered by the refresh rate. So the "world that doen't exists anymore" is very much alive if you ask me!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rio197 15y agoawesome history
- bch 15y agoIt's been pointed out that world -does- exist (just not as pervasively distributed as it was): people are using slow satellite connections, or low-powered devices where vi is the perfect fit. Regardless, whether vi was written "for a world which doesn't exist anymore", vi still works perfectly well in the world we live in, and a lot of people produce a lot of value with it, and enjoy using it. vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore; welcome vi to the world in which we live today.
- mlopes 15y agoI don't know which world he lives in, but in mine, it is used every day... and it's not even my main editor.
- ojbyrne 15y agoThis seems like a back-handed endorsement of Emacs ;-)
- kahirsch 15y agoIn another interview, Coulouris said: > By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".
- pconf 15y agoStill my most used piece of software ever. No other text editor comes close in efficiency. Let those who can't learn vi remain tethered by the mouse, they'll never be able to write or edit text as quickly. Now if only the sc spreadsheet could be retrofitted with Lotus 123 menus. With that, vi, and screen I'd be nearly as efficient as 15 years ago with 123, MKS vi, and Desqview. Sad that today's software interfaces have so little to do with efficiency (and that includes the 'pc' keyboard layout).
- gonzo 15y agoI used to work for wnj. I asked him about vi. His retort, "I wrote that when I didn't know how to program." He uses Textedit (on a Mac) these days. (Emacs bindings, if you didn't know.) He hasn't used vi in years.
- cmkrnl 15y agoNice - always interested in hearing what the old geniuses are up to now.
- zaph0d 15y agoMany vi users don't know that they don't use vi but use ViM which was created by Bram Moolenaar.