ahahahahahahahahaha. This is hilarious. The author of vi says:
"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.
9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.
The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.
So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.
It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24KB."
In other words, the PRIMARY design constraint with VI was how long it took to update a screen. All these keyboard modes and so on are about getting as little over the wire as possible while still having a full screenful to look at locally.
Sure, this idiom actually is very useful on a locally-running vi too (not to mention vi over an ssh), the keyboard commands are a powerful way to interface with the text.
But the idea of porting this to a machine that 1) will run vi locally (not on the remote machine through an SSH session), and 2) has no keyboard
no, not at all. In fact I administer my own computer with vi (meaning vim), from a local terminal instance.
But the fact remains that porting an app like that to a touchscreen device meant to hide systems administration (as iOS does) is getting so far BOTH from the history of vi AND its most prevalent current usage.
That doesn't mean it's not very cool. I just thought it would be interesting to reflect on the background.
I guess what some people say about a bluetooth keyboard...almost makes this somehow useful. Still, that keyboard is not always going to be there.
"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.
9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.
The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.
So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.
It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24KB."
source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_g...
In other words, the PRIMARY design constraint with VI was how long it took to update a screen. All these keyboard modes and so on are about getting as little over the wire as possible while still having a full screenful to look at locally.
Sure, this idiom actually is very useful on a locally-running vi too (not to mention vi over an ssh), the keyboard commands are a powerful way to interface with the text.
But the idea of porting this to a machine that 1) will run vi locally (not on the remote machine through an SSH session), and 2) has no keyboard
is so funny it hurts! Still, A for Effort.