15 ms·
EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor (1981)
- kourt 12y agoThis is nice to see a relatively brief introduction to the essential features. Steve Yegge wrote: "Go look over Paul Nordstrom's shoulder while he works sometime, if you don't believe me. It's a real eye-opener for someone who's used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career." Does anyone know of any public video of Mr. Nordstrom using emacs, or can someone who knows him request one? [edit: properly attribute the quote]
- conistonwater 12y agoThis identical question on SO has some links, but not the one you are looking for, it seems: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/140336/where-can-i-find-a-video-of-a-professional-using-emacs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/140336/where-can-i-find-a...
- abp 12y agoWell, Emacs Rocks: http://emacsrocks.com/ http://emacsrocks.com/
- DonHopkins 12y agoNot only that, but also: Emacs Loves You. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo
- tephra 12y agoI actually found an earlier version of this paper in my teachers room (published 1979). It's AI Memo 519 (the linked paper is 591A) and I can't find a reference to this anywhere. I even emailed Stallman and he couldn't remember when it was first published (he thought that it was published in 1981 first to). I uploaded it to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MITAIMemo519 https://archive.org/details/MITAIMemo519 My teacher suspects he got it from a guy that used to work at MIT at the time (can't remember the name). I have not been able to find it anywhere else, even the AI memo archive doesn't have it (http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0500browse.shtml http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0500browse.shtml). Anyone able to shed some light?
- Aloha 12y agoftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-519A.pdf
- tephra 12y agoYes that is 519A which is not the same as the one I found called just 519. 519A was published 1981, 519 seemingly in 1979.
- mjn 12y agoThere are a few papers circa 1980 that cite an AI Lab memo with this title and give a date of 1979 [1], so there must indeed have been a version circulated earlier than the 1981 "A" version. Have you tried contacting the CSAIL archivist to see if they'd be interested in putting up a non-A version of 519? [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802784 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802784, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=990280 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=990280
- tephra 12y agoYes I emailed them when I found it but got no response. I will email them again and see if they are interested.
- waynecochran 12y agoI'll just leave this here: http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/
- lelf 12y agoGNU Emacs Manual, 1st ed. — http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/fsf/GNU_Emacs_Version16_Jun85.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/fsf/GNU_Emacs_Version... Edit: you can buy the modern version from FSF: http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/ http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/
- brandonhsiao 12y agoAm I reading this right? You used to... not be able to see your code verbatim as you were editing it? My god, that sounds horrible.
- LukeShu 12y agoYou are reading that right. If it makes it seem any more sane, that's because many text editors of the time weren't written for screens ("displays"), but for teletypes, where you couldn't possibly see your code verbatim as you were editing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASR-33_at_CHM.agr.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASR-33_at_CHM.agr.jpg For example, the standard editor on early Unix was 'ed'. It is available on most modern *nix systems, if you care to try it :). Bill Joy later modified ed to be a display editor, or 'vi'sual editor; so if you have you have used Vi, it shouldn't be too unfamiliar.
- jemfinch 12y agovi evolved from ex (not ed), didn't it?
- LukeShu 12y agoWell, ex is 'ex'tended ed, and vi and ex are the same program. From 1976-1979, the way to open vi was to execute 'ex', and run the 'vi[sual]' command in ex. In 1979, ex learned to launch the 'vi' command automatically if argv[0] is "vi", and a symlink from 'bin/vi' to 'bin/ex' was added.
- dasil003 12y agoHave you ever used a 300bps modem to connect to the internet? If you did then you would see how avoiding rendering could make you much much more productive.
- kalleboo 12y agoIf anyone using a Mac wants to experience this, there exists the retro terminal emulator "Cathode" which can emulate various modem speeds (along with curved glass, CRT phosphor persistence, etc) http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- conistonwater 12y agoI want to point out this quote: "The traditional attitude towards Lisp holds that it is useful only for esoteric amusements and Artificial Intelligence. The appearance of Multics EMACS as a Honeywell product is the death knell of this view." I agree!
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThe original IDE, and originally outlawed for 'regular' users because it dragged the the DEC KL10 to its knees in I/O traffic if more than 20 or 30 terminals ran it at the same time. It is an interesting environment but for what ever reason I ended up back in VIM (at school it was Emacs or FINE, at home 'MicroEMACS' and at Sun it was 'vi') Now vim is my go to editor but I'm not as fast as some folks who have melded well with either EMACS or VIM.
- bellerocky 12y agoI just had this thought, what if Linus came in or HMS or someone else kinda already famous did a "Show HN: I made a extensible editor called emacs" or "Show HN: I made a posix compatible kernel" Would lead to some interesting discussions I think if they were active in the comments.
- shortsightedsid 12y agoPretty sure that Andrew Tanenbaum would comment about Microkernels being superior and how monolithic kernels are doomed to fail and belong in the past!
- JadeNB 12y agoEponysterical (http://metachat.org/index.php/2005/11/16/did_we_ever_decide#c58136 http://metachat.org/index.php/2005/11/16/did_we_ever_decide#...)?
- lispm 12y agoStallman did not mention Guy L Steele jr. and Dave Moon. Not so nice... http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html Dan Weinreb described it this way: '(TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.'
- mjn 12y agoHmm, this other 1979-era history of Emacs also doesn't mention Steele, though it does mention Weinreb and Moon, whom the author seems to have worked with closely: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html.
- Curmudgel 12y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20120217011347/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://web.archive.org/web/20120217011347/http://danweinreb....
- kps 12y agoThat's a wonderfully interesting article. Steele was one of the authors of the TMACS package, for which this article has “???” in the references. Incidentally, the article mentions Multics' version of QED in passing; this regular-expression-based editor was written by Ken Thompson¹ and is a (more complicated) ancestor of ed(1), the standard text editor on Unix. ¹ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/qed.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/qed.html
- pekk 12y agoAll these years later and XEmacs is still trying to steamroll RMS. Can you just stop?
- hga 12y agoI heard this history from an eyewitness in, oh, about 1981 plus or minus a year, long before RMS forked Gosling Emacs for his GNU Emacs. None of the three other listed AI Lab names ever had anything to do with these C/UNIX(TM) versions of EMACS.
- hibbelig 12y agoWhat's fascinating is that under "Research Through Development of Installed Tools", the author describes agile software development, some twenty years before it got that name.
- rpdillon 12y agoI found this amusing, towards the end: Bravo comes from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Its orientation is toward text formatting, and it can display multiple fonts, underlining, etc. It makes heavy use of a graphical pointing device, the `mouse' (see Augment). It is not programmable and offers no special help for editing programs as opposed to text. For more information, see your local industrial espionage agent.
- earljwagner 12y agoSome trivia: Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor, was developed by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi at PARC. Simonyi left PARC in 1981 to join Microsoft and led the Word and Excel projects.
- cheez 12y agoHere is to another 30 years of Emacs.
- ams6110 12y agoWhat we decide is not worth while to add, the user can provide for himself. He can just as easily provide his own alternative to a feature if he does not like the way it works in the standard system. Written before the PC police insisted upon alternating He/She pronouns, awkward constructions such as "He or she", or flatly incorrect usage, i.e. "their" as a singular.
- Permit 12y agoHas your quality of life really suffered so much now that you're encouraged to write to a broader audience?