Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim

Summary

I went to East London last week to visit my wife's alma mater, Queen Mary University. As I stopped to grab a cup of coffee, I received a message saying that Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, had passed. To be honest, with a new family member keeping me busy at home, and a new course on MIPS assembler that I'm recording for my school, I am finding very difficult to keep up with the latest news. So, I confess that I received the news of Bram's passing almost a week too late. I did not know Bram personally and I am far from being a Vim connoisseur, but the fact that I was visiting Queen Mary University forced me to stop for a moment and reflect on how that place was connected to the long and vibrant history of Vim. Queen Mary University had an important role in the history of the Vim editor. It was here that, in 1973, the first UNIX system of the UK was installed, and it was also here that professor George Coulouris developed an editor called em. The creation of em ended up snowballing into the development of vi and many other vi clones after that. Queen Mary University of London, where George Coulouris taught in 1976. Ed The UNIX shell is extremely text-heavy. Executables are invoked via text, parameters are passed via text, streams of data flow up and down the system via text, and virtually everything in the OS shell is done with tokens of text. It is no surprise that UNIX users are so passionate about text editors. We should probably start with ed, which was a command-line editor created by Ken Thompson designed to work well with teleprinters rather than display terminals. Teletype Model 15 teleprinter. Ed is what we call a line editor. Editing one line at a time made perfect sense for teleprinters, but with the popularity of video displays taking over, most users found frustrating having to work with ed. That included Queen Mary's George Coulouris, who considered ed's commands to be cryptic and not suitable for "mortals". Ed (line) editor. Ken Thompson's ed was i...