> >I'm not sure, but at a guess, K&R wrote curses and vi to avoid having to
> >edit using ed.  They wrote C because the didn't like pdp11 assembler :-)
> 
> I'm reasonably sure that Bill Joy wrote vi, and I got the distinct
> impression that people at Bell Labs regarded it with a bit of disdain
> (I met people at Bell Labs in the mid-90's that were still die-hard ed
> users, believe it or not).  I was once at a talk by Peter Salus, who
> said that a quote that he always remembered from folks at Bell Labs
> (I don't recall who) was along the lines of, "I've never felt the need
> to look at more than one line of source code at the same time".

Doesn't surprise me, command editors are often faster that wysisyg ones.
Fortunately vi has enough commands available to make it moderately quick.
Mind you, it helps if you are generating compilations listings on proper
fanfold paper....
Until development got some P266 (running UnixWare) I always used an async
terminal [1] - far faster than anything else for screen scrolling etc.

[1] ran it at 132x48 @ 38400 baud with 2 lines (to different computers
for redundancy). Keyboard flip between the lines + job control.

But I've always used screen editors - ever since we got teco on the pdp11.
(Not actually usable under rsx/11m on the 11/40, but ok under rt11 on
the 11/03.)
Remember those days? 2.5Mb hard disks! 250k 8" floppy! Core memory faster
than MOS memory!


    David