History of the Text Editor

Writing software today is nothing like it was back in the 70's, when using an "on-line" editor meant viewing one line of a program at a time.

Since even today's editors borrowed ideas from the very first ones, here's a quick overview of the origins of the text editor and how the idea of editing text has evolved since punch cards.

Both the popularity of time-sharing and the teletype made editing a program possible for the first time. Instead of feeding in punch cards, you could use an electromechanical typewriter-printer combo to communicate with a computer directly, in realtime. But, with limited memory and slow feedback, the first text editors were still pretty close to punching holes in cards.

1965

The "Quick Editor", qed for short, was one of the very first line based editors. Ken Thompson, who helped write the Unix operating system, ended up writing his own version that made significant improvements like searching with regular expressions, text buffers, and macros when he started working at Bell Labs.

1971

As qed because increasingly complex and as new hardware needed new implementations, Ken eventually created a simplified version named ed, which shipped with the first version of Unix. It kept the basic line editing paradigm but cut down on supported regular expressions and removed the use of multiple buffers. Even though it was simplified, the commands were still difficult to remember which spurred a few modified versions, most importantly: em and ex.

1976

With the increasing popularity of cheaper CRT displays, most terminals had enough real estate to display more than one line at a time. Bill Joy, borrowing ideas from em and Bravo, added a screen mode to ex which later became vi.

The same year the first version of emacs, was released, with functionality similar to vi, but was actually based on the Eeditor and not a descendant of ed.

The early versions of emacs had more powerful macros and unified commands, but the use of vi spread quicker, most likely due to Bill's involvement in Unix.

1985

As the first GNU project, Richard Stallman wrote his own free version of emacs with a full LISP implementation. It was eventually ported to Unix and other operating systems, making it the most popular implementation. It's still actively maintained today.

1991

Written by Bram Moolenaar, vim, short for Vi Improved, was originally released for the Amiga and then later released on almost all Unix distributions. It included a wide number of enhancements like plugins, syntax highlighting, better macro support, and a help module. The last major release was in 2010, while new plugins and add-ons are still being developed.

Today

Since then, editors got a lot fancier with GUI windows, integrated compilers and built-in debugging support. However, these older text based editors are popular among developers, which, while harder to learn, are still more efficient at navigating source code.

It has been over 20 years since the youngest of these editors was released, but you would be surprised by how many places emacs shortcut keys still work, and how many developers still use an 80-character line limit now that we're no longer limited by the number of columns on a punch card.Type your post