People don’t know that vi was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.” Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore,” Joy said. “The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. To this day, that accounts for at least some of the rhythm of editing with vi. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. “That’s also the reason you have all these funny commands. It was really hard to do because you’ve got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem,” Joy told Unix Review. There’s a myth that Bill Joy whipped up vi over a weekend, but Joy emphatically says “No.
And it was in the second release of BSD Unix - in May of 1979 - that the program was finally installed under its now-familiar name vi - a name which indicated to users that it was ex launched in its visual mode. The pair eventually worked their way up from em to ex, which was included in the first release of BSD Unix in March of 1978. I’d break the editor and he’d fix it and then he’d break it and I’d fix it…”
“Chuck would come in at night - we really didn’t work exactly the same hours although we overlapped in the afternoon. Working with Chuck Haley, the pair kept adding features - Haley added the ability to move the cursor along the bottom line, according to another interview Joy gave to Unix Review back in 1984 - back when Joy was still in his 20s. So what happened next? “We modified em and created en,” Bill Joy told Linux Magazine.
#Vim text editor code
While applauding Bill Joy for expanding his single-line editor into a full-screen editor, “ vi would probably never have seen the light of day if I hadn’t sat down at the terminal next to him at Berkeley in the summer of 1976 and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my code lives on in ‘vi’.”
#Vim text editor software
“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’.”įor years to come, Coulouris remained proud of his contribution to the early days of software development, judging by his 2003 comments to the tech site the Register. “ ed is certainly frustrating,” Joy remembered.īut there was also a fateful visitor that summer from Queen Mary College, University of London - specifically George Coulouris, who later described their meeting in the book “A Quarter Century of UNIX.” Coulouris had brought along a Dectape with the code for a text editor of his own, a modification of ed which he’d named “em” - a shortened version of “ed for mortals.” In the summer of 1976, Joy’s job was to fix it. Thompson himself had visited Berkeley, and left behind a broken Pascal system. Before that he’d been using the ed text editor - originally written by Unix pioneer Ken Thompson in 1969. Joy wrote vi, the predecessor to eVim, around 1976 - six years before he co-founded Sun Microsystems - while he was still a graduate student at U.C.
It was really exciting to finally use lowercase.” “That summer we got lowercase ROMs for our terminals. “efore that summer, we could only type in uppercase,” Bill Joy told Linux Magazine. It’s a reminder that in the developer community, we’re always standing on the shoulders of those who came before - and of what the early days of computing were really like. In text files scattered around the web - and through the occasional YouTube video - it’s possible to trace the early history of the Unix-based text editors that went on to become Vim, still in wide use more than 40 years later. When it comes to the most popular text editor on Linux systems, some history is hidden in plain sight.