On 17/02/2021 21:18, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Feb 2021 20:53:14 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
>
>> vi was a superstructure pasted on ed as far as I can recall
>
>  Correct - it stands for Visual Interface.
>
>> It was never designed as a CRT based editor. It is 100% line oriented
>
>  Vi was most certainly designed as a CRT based interface to an
> editor, one of the very first such. Some of the screen handling code in the
> original vi wound up as part of curses.
>
Er no...it wasnt


" The vi editor was developed starting around 1976 by Bill Joy, who was
then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Joy
later went on to help found Sun Microsystems and became its Chief Scientist.

"ed" was the original Unix text editor. *Like other early text editors,
it was line oriented and used from dumb printing terminals*. Joy first
developed "ex" as an improved line editor that supported a superset of
ed commands. He then developed vi as a "visual interface" to ex. That
is, it allows text to be viewed on a full screen rather than only one
line at a time. vi takes its name from this fact.

vi remains very popular today in spite of the development and widespread
availability of GUI (graphical user interface) mode text editors which
are far more intuitive and much easier for beginners to use than
text-mode text editors such as vi. GUI-mode text editors include gedit
and Emacs, both of which have become very common on Linux and other
Unixes today. "

http://www.linfo.org/vi/history.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps you didnt take my meaning. Vi was never designed *from the
ground up* as a CRT oriented WYSIWYG editor. It was a bolted on *Visual
Interface* enhancement to ed/ex and as such retains all the line
oriented controls and is almost useless in terms of being able to edit
AND move around the document, and it has ed's powerful tools BECAUSE of
that.

I dont know what if anything was the first decent CRT based text editor
for Unix, because I never found one. Maybe EMACS. I never bothered to
learn that because my time on Unix systems was as a hired contract coder
- I never had my 'own' environment - and you had to work with whatever
was available and that meant overwhelmingly vi as the highest common
factor..

Since I had already worked with Wordstar on CP/M and DOS, vi was, by
comparison, utter shit.

But I learnt what I needed to to get the job done

--
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early
twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a
globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and,
on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer
projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to
contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

Richard Lindzen

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05