Good article on the history of vi and clones

[Spiros Bousbouras]

https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

[Julieta Shem]

Post by Spiros Bousbouras
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

Nice! Thanks for sharing that.

[John McCue]

Post by Spiros Bousbouras
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

Thanks, very nice article. I had forgot about em, I
never new it was called em, but I remember something
called "ed for mortals". How it morphed into ex was a
good read.

One pedantic nit, in the clone section they forgot about nvi
(vi default for the BSDs).

IIRC it was created from an older version of Elvis and was
created due to the BSD/AT&T lawsuit.

[Axel Reichert]

Post by John McCue

Post by Spiros Bousbouras
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

Thanks, very nice article.

Same here, thanks for the pointer, Spiros!

Post by John McCue
I had forgot about em

I never KNEW about "em". Also, it was not on my radar that "ed" (and, I
checked this later, "ex" and "vi") are part of POSIX.

While browsing, I also found

https://softpanorama.org/Articles/orthodox_editors.shtml

which mention a whole bunch of (unknown to me) editor beasts, XEDIT,
KEDIT, The Hessling Editor, ...

From a quick read, they seem to have mostly died/may be still live in
very small niches occupied by former IBM and OS/2 people. Comments on
these "Eastern Orthodox Editors"?

Best regards

Axel

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Axel Reichert
While browsing, I also found
https://softpanorama.org/Articles/orthodox_editors.shtml
which mention a whole bunch of (unknown to me) editor beasts, XEDIT,
KEDIT, The Hessling Editor, ...

Not sure if that “XEDIT” is the same as the xedit in this package
<https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/x11-apps>, which is still available
in current Debian and no doubt its myriad of derivatives as well.

[Axel Reichert]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Axel Reichert
which mention a whole bunch of (unknown to me) editor beasts, XEDIT,
KEDIT, The Hessling Editor, ...

Not sure if that “XEDIT” is the same as the xedit in this package
<https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/x11-apps>

No. But Debian has The Hessling Editor,

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/editors/the

if you want to play around. It boasts various regex flavours, see

https://hessling-editor.sourceforge.net/doc/commset/SETREGEXP.html

Best regards

Axel

[Janis Papanagnou]

Post by Axel Reichert
While browsing, I also found
https://softpanorama.org/Articles/orthodox_editors.shtml
which mention a whole bunch of (unknown to me) editor beasts, XEDIT,
KEDIT, The Hessling Editor, ...

(It should be noted that we shouldn't confuse these with some Unix
editors carrying the same name; XEDIT is not the same as the xedit
we find on Linux, and KEDIT is not the KDE editor, just to be sure.)

Post by Axel Reichert
From a quick read, they seem to have mostly died/may be still live in
very small niches occupied by former IBM and OS/2 people. Comments on
these "Eastern Orthodox Editors"?

I have only faint memories on XEDIT that I used during the 1980's
on a VM/CMS system. The only thing I remember is that it had a very
convenient interface (for that time). At these days I preferred it
to Vi (that I used on VM/UTS), because of Vi's steep learning curve
(and me having been a Vi novice).

Janis

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

(... KEDIT is not the KDE editor, just to be sure.)

There is no KDE editor called “KEDIT”, that I can see. The editor/IDE of
choice for KDE is called “Kate”.