Ask HN: Do you think that Vim is a reflection of extreme functional UX design?
4 comments
I recall there also was em which displayed a single line as it changed. With ed I used to invoke the 'p' command constantly to confirm that my changes were correct. With em it was done for me automatically.
IMO Unix utilities evolved along with the concurrent advances in technology. If anything, the pioneers were far more concerned about functionality than aesthetics. The earliest UX principles only emerged from the work on Smalltalk at Xerox PARC.
IMO Unix utilities evolved along with the concurrent advances in technology. If anything, the pioneers were far more concerned about functionality than aesthetics. The earliest UX principles only emerged from the work on Smalltalk at Xerox PARC.
interesting thank you for the in depth reply. heres some cookies (*.)(*.)(*.)
I don't think anybody knew those big words when vi was cooked up.
When the happy hackers at UC Berkeley were porting UNIX onto VAXen (becoming BSD Unix), CRT terminals were available, notably the DEC VT-100 and other less expensive ones. These terminals had commands that would move the terminal cursor around the screen, allowing a editing program to modify the 24 (or 25) lines of 80 characters on the display. But the terminal commands were DIFFERENT. So the configuration file TERMCAP and the C library libcurses were created.
Then 'ed' / 'ex' was expanded to become 'vi' (visual, not six). Note that the 'ed'/'ex' commands are still there, invoked by the ':' command. Now there was a full screen text editor that worked on different CRT terminals.
This was all before UX design existed. It evolved. 'vi' was a giant leap up from a typewriter editor.
(We don't need no stinkin' mices)