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Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim
The history of Vi & Vim goes hand in hand with the history of open-source software. This article looks at the historical events that shaped the evolution of these text editors.
Inspired by Coulouris' em, and by their own tweaks to Ken Thompson's ed, Bill Joy and Chuck Haley (both graduate students at UC Berkeley) created a new editor called en. 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... Most users were spending all their time in ex's visual mode, so Bill Joy decided to create an hard link called " vi" and add it to the second distribution of BSD in May of 1979.
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