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Cake day: July 12th, 2024
  • Jankatarch@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•KDE devs are great at naming things!
    2·
    1 day ago

    Here is just the history of vim off the top of my head.

    Ken Thompson wrote ed the editor (pronounced by spelling each letter) and still is the standard text editor in unix. He also worked majorly on original Unix and C.

    You could only see the line you are typing and had to rewrite whole line to change one letter.

    Then Bill Joy wrote ex as an improvement to ed. But wanted to keep improving. As he improved ex it got a visual editor and became vi. (read by spelling each letter) Bill Joy later led BSD Unix.

    Ken Thompson improved vi to make stevie. (for atari ST) There were further improvements and ports like Amiga.

    Stevie wasn’t as close to original vi as Steve Kirkendall wanted so he wrote elvis as an alternative improvement.

    AT&T still owned UNIX at the time and famously sued BSD Unix. They had to replace all Unix tools to not get in trouble.

    So even tho Bill Joy who is leading BSD wrote original vi, they had to find an alternative. At first they were gonna use elvis but Keith Bostic wanted a bug-to-bug compatible version and wrote nvi.

    Then in 1991 Bram Moolinar wrote “vi improved” or “vim” for short by basing source code on Amiga’s stevie port to raise awareness about Uganda.

    He was also a “benevolent dictator for life” which is a term used for opensource devs that always have the final say in the project. Opensource leaders must be benevolent as disagreements result in forks.

    So far these were mostly few years apart but much later in 2014 vim rejected multithreading and we got the fork neovim which doesn’t have a wikipedia page and where my original research stopped.

    Fun fact at the end. The nvi editor was forked in dragonfly BSD with name nvi2 and bsd systems still have nvi.