The keyboard for the AMD-3A, the terminal Bill Joy was using. Not only do you not need a mouse to get stuff done in these, but you don’t need such niceties as PgUp/PgDown, Home/End, Ins/Del, or arrow keys.

They were both conceived and built as keyboard-only editors, for use in a command-line interface. It’s 15th among web developers, and 14th for devOps. Stallman would go on to create the version called GNU Emacs, which would quickly be the most popular and most ported Emacs version.Įmacs is currently the 15th most popular development environment, according to the latest Stack Overflow survey. Put in modern terms: you can fork the project, make your commits, and then make a pull request, but it will be the responsibility of the project owner to merge with the master branch. “EMACS was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed.” Interesting side note: Stallman saw the issue with too much customization and wrote this: Stallman and Steele took on the task of unifying all the different macro sets into one they called the final product, including facilities for documenting and extending the macro set, Emacs, for Editor MACro S. “EMACS as such actually started out as a standards project…” - Guy Steele No two implementations of TECO would work the same. This was a popular feature among the hackers of the MIT AI lab, and hackers being hackers, customization ran rampant. It was Richard Stallman and a few others that added things like being able to read, edit, and write a file at the same time, and defining macros: keystrokes to run other TECO programs. Meanwhile in the past, MIT’s ITS operating system used a line editor called TECO, for Tape Editor and Corrector, which was similar to Bell Lab’s ed, and just as cryptic in syntax. In the most recent Stack Overflow development survey, it tied for fourth in most popular development environment, as well as second most popular for devOps and, surprisingly, fifth for web developers. Vim, which here I’ll use more or less interchangeably to trigger the pedantic, is a port of vi that has been included in most distros of Linux since time immemorial (which in computer terms is early- to mid-90s). BSD, thanks to permissive licensing, was the basis for a lot of flavors of Unix, one of which was the basis for macOS, so vi became the default editor for most anyone in a POSIX environment (i.e. Bill Joy, as one of the developers of ex, redesigned ex to include a visual mode, which you started within ex by typing visual, or, if you were in a hurry, vi.īill Joy was also responsible for releasing BSD Unix, with ed and ex as the included text editors. (Fans of this blog will remember that was the reason for line numbers when coding in BASIC.)Įven for a line editor, ed’s commands were cryptic, so that led to the development of em, the ‘ editor for mortals,’ which led to en, probably because ’n’ comes after ‘m,’ which led to ex, or extended en. ed was a line editor: you could edit one line at a time, but not a whole screen of text line editors like ed were meant to output to teleprinters, not CRT screens. U NIX was developed starting in 1969 at Bell Labs, and one of the first parts developed was a text editor called ed (as in ‘ editor’).

Vim over emacs