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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#24
post #5

I see MS-DOS is mentioned near the bottom, but the part I was most curious about was not. When I got my dad's old Windows 3.1 laptop somewhere around 1999, I discovered DOS and started fiddling with it, eventually discovering the "edlin" editor. Everyone else though it was bizarre and hard to use, but I really liked it because I could look at different parts of a file at the same time. The commands were similar to th…

I was around 12 and got an assembly programming book. It stated that one has to use decent text editor like edlin to write assembly. Well, I went for it and even entered few programs until realizing that under norton’s F3 it is just a regular text file. After a little frustration and experiments with F4 I understood that edlin wasn’t special for editing .asm files. F8 on edlin.exe was the first thing I did afterwards. Or was it edlin.com back then?

Re: Where Vim Came From

#27
> How did Vim become so successful?

I recall the early days of RoR crowd were pushing for Vim too. It was hipster in term of adopting new and awesome things and RoR crowd really push some new things. This was when the editors war was still a thing.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#28

> How did Vim become so successful? I recall the early days of RoR crowd were pushing for Vim too. It was hipster in term of adopting new and awesome things and RoR crowd really push some new things. This was when the editors war was still a thing.

I’m assuming RoR is Ruby on Rails here? If so, this seems extremely odd considering the age of the two things.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#30

Though e-lisp is great and I appreciate the power and regularity of Emacs, Vi(m)'s mode-full, default cmd-mode editing that doesn't require ctrl + meta + esc left_foot_pedal + wink-wink-nudge-nudge... seems so much nicer to me than insert-by-default editing - thank goodness there are vim plugins everywhere. The TRS-80 Level II line editor was very much in the spirit of "em", along with other BASICs of the day. And pe…

I'm always kind of curious about comments like this -- it seems everybody knows you have to play games of Twister and hit twelve control keys simultaneously to do even the most basic things in Emacs. But... I use Emacs. I've been using it for almost twenty years. And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously (keys pressed in sequence obviously don…

> And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously

One I can think of is M-! (shell-command). I'm a vim user, and I frequently use the corresponding :r !some_command to read output from a shell command into the vim buffer.

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