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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Great show this week - well done to all the participants!
It was good to see Bram Moolenaar, who died on August 3rd, getting a mention. Bram was the creator of the Vim text editor.
There’s no denying the contribution that Bram made to computing, ensuring that the style of text editing established with Bill Joy’s vi editor lived on into the 21st Century.
Today, Vim is part of all standard Linux/UNIX builds, including macOS. As such, it has good claim to being the most ubiquitous text editor in the world.
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But not the most loved… 
It has saved my bacon on many occasions, where no other text editor was installed.
I think the worst editor I used was probably edlin or a similar line editor on the HP 3000. I was stick editing on one in London, but I was in Coventry, 9600 baud to 1200 to 300 to 19200 to 9600, it was a pain, at times, it took half an hour for a keyless to register. I was editing ‘blind’, typing in new characters on the line, deleting characters, inserting others, then sitting back and waiting for the system to catch up… You really had to picture the whole line in your head, otherwise you would have to escape out and start again. At least it have a lot of time for coffee and planning out the reports I was programming on paper first.
I worked a great many years in just pure Vi on a Sun Solaris workstation such that I think I have most of the Vi “UI” burned into my brain. I know in later years, on some Linux installations, when you requested Vi you were just getting a special mode of Vim.
Hmmm… I don’t have fond memories of programming FORTRAN on VSPC
The editor I loved most might have been TPU (EVE) on a monochrome VT320 on a DEC VAX 11/780 system I used at my first programming employer. It was highly configurable/programmable, and my team had a base configuration that helped a lot with the coding in the team specific style.
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As with Leo, I’ve been an Emacs user for decades and it’s still the text editor I reach for whenever I need to do text work. It’s helpful also that the basic Emacs key sequences for moving around text are standard on most well-behaved macOS software.
Like big_D, I have no fondness for line-based text editors - I have painful memories of the one built into the Sinclair ZX81 that was used to write BASIC programs and the way that it would misbehave as the built-in 1K of memory became close to full!
But this is a time for recognising Bram’s contributions. Most professional programmers will have stories similar to big_D’s about how Vim saved the day and we should acknowledge the debt of thanks we all owe Bram for this.
Even as an Emacs user, I am always amazed when I see what vim masters can do with just a few keystrokes. Every one who uses a *nix command line needs to know :w and :q
Yes, TPU is one of the best editors I ever used. I started on the 11/750 and back then, we were using EDT, so I often used the built in TPU macro to switch the keyboard functions over to EDT standard, but the scripting in TPU was brilliant, so much more comfortable than Emacs.
I did later learn Emacs on the Amiga, but I never really felt comfortable with it.
@whern the ZX81 line editor was a luxury, compared to the one on the HP3000! That was a real pleasure to use, in comparison, which should tell you just how bad the experience with the HP was. At least with the ZX81 you could cursor back and forth and make your code changes. With the HP3000, you had to start on an empty line and “space” to the part where you wanted to insert a new character, then press i to switch to insert mode. If you wanted to delete something, the same, you spaced out on your empty line, to the position of the real line above, then hit d, everything, as the Germans say, in Blindflug (blind flight) - especially when the cursor was half an hour behind you!
@Leo yes, vim is a great tool and you can accomplish a lot with it. It is, in essence, a full-screen editor version of the HP3000 editor I mentioned, in many ways, but it is incredibly user friendly, in comparison! :lol: Bram will be sorely missed.
Has there not been progress on fixing bias issues with facial recognition software? It seems like I’ve been hearing Leo and his crew talking about bias against people of color for 5-10 years. It doesn’t seem like something that should take a decade to solve, but it’s also not something I’ve explicitly been following.