The Making of Vim: One of the Text Editors of All Time

from just a personal challenge in 1988 to one of the most beloved text editors in the world the evolution and development of Vim is a compelling tale of individual Ingenuity coming together community-driven enhancement and open-source principles Vim for those unfamiliar is a text editor known for its efficiency customizability and Powerful command-based interface but it's more than just a text editor it's an ecosystem with a unique approach to coding that has captivated programmers from around the world one could say it all started in 1988 with Bram mullinar a Dutch software developer after he got the new Amiga computer all he wanted to do was edit code in v in his case Stevie a clone of VI but it was buggy and frankly unsatisfying so bran began writing a new VI Port of sorts a project he named VI imitation or Vim for short however the story of Vim truly began 19 years earlier with the creation of the Ed text editor by Ken Thompson which was one of the first first three key elements of the Unix operating system in August 1969 at the famous and historical AT&T Bell Labs actually many features of Ed came from the QED text editor short for quick editor developed at Thompson's Alma moer UC Berkeley in the mid 1960s by Butler Lamson and L Peter deut for the Berkeley time sharing System since Thompson was very familiar with QED and even reimplemented versions of QED that were notable as the first to implement Reg Expressions it's only natural he utilized that knowledge while building Ed which went to become the original editor distributed with the Bell Labs versions of the Unix operating system in the 1970s however it was notably rather user unfriendly so in 1975 George kerice of Queen Mary College London developed an improved version of Ed he called em short for editor for Mortals as he thought the cryptic commands of Ed to be only suitable for immortals while visiting Berkeley in 1976 galores brought a deck tape containing em and showed the editor to various people including Bill Joy who alongside Chuck Haley took code from em to make en n by modifying it to be less demanding on the processor soon after Bruce angler encouraged Bill Joy to redesign the editor and so he did June through October 1977 Bill Joy added a full screen visual interface to ex thereby becoming the vi text editor with the name VI coming from the abbreviated ex command VI used to enter visual mode or the visual interface as VI and ex share their code and VI is just the ex binary launching with the capability to render the text being edited into the computer terminal fast forward 10 years to 1987 and here comes Stevie short for St editor for Vi enthusiasts a now discontinued clone of VI written by Tim Thompson for the Atari St and for those wondering no Tim Thompson and Ken Thompson are surprisingly not related Tim Thompson posted his original C source code for this clone as free software to the comp. c.i. St News Group on June 28th 1987 where then Tony Andrews added features and ported it to Unix os2 and Amiga posting his version as free software to the comp. sources. Unix newsg group on June 6 1988 where we know at least one particular individual to have used it br mullol but the most notable part about Stevie is that it isn't VI based but instead an actual clone it did not use any of VI source code this was important because VI source code used the Ed text editor developed under you guessed it AT&T and therefore VI could only be used by those with an AT&T Source license sounds a bit familiar if you've seen my previous making of videos so when Bram decided he wanted to create his own version of VI he ported Stevie which was bound by no such license bran began working on Vim for the Amiga computer in 1988 and publicly released the first version in 1991 known as vim v1.14 and as a matter of fact at the time of this first release the name Vim was not an acrin for Vi improved but instead an acronym for Vi imitation it wasn't until late 1993 where this changed to be how we know it today Vim VI improved after the first public release Vim quickly evolved incorporating features that were not originally part of VI this included syntax highlighting multi-level undo redo and a comprehensive help system transforming it from A Simple Text Editor to a powerful tool for programming and file management and let's not forget themm scriptability allowing users to write their own plugins and scripts which significantly contributed to its flexibility and popularity the subsequent versions of Vim built upon this Foundation continuously adding new features and important Milestones included the introduction of a graphical user interface with VM 4.0 in 1996 significant improvements in text rendering and editing capabilities with Vim 5.0 in 1998 and the introduction of features like tabed editing and spell checking in later versions each version aimed to enhance user experience while maintaining the efficiency and command driven approach that Vim users valued today vim's source code is actively developed and maintained on GitHub by a Global community of contributors this collaborative environment has been instrumental in keeping themm relevant and Powerful adapting to the rapidly evolving technology and programming needs as we enter 2023 Vim now over 30 years old remains a Cornerstone in the world of text editing not just sustaining but thriving with a predicted market growth of 13.5% through to 2030 it's one of the most popular text editors in the world every year the stack over overflow developer survey finds themm to be one of the most popular text editors used among programmers in 2018 it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers and in 2019 determined to be the fifth most popular development environment period all of this it's it's just a testament to vim's enduring design and adaptability and a rapidly evolving technological landscape serving a vast Global community of developers and power users Vim continues to evolve promis ing new enhancements and user interfaces and collaborative features built by contributors from around the world so yes we have all of the open source contributors to thank for Vim as well as the developers of vimm's predecessors like Ken Thompson Dennis Richie Bill Joy George kerice Chuck Haley and Tim Thompson but most importantly we have to thank Bram mullinar an enthusiastic software developer that via Vim has touched the lives of more programmers and CIS admins than we can account unfortunately Bram passed away earlier in 2023 and while he may be gone his legacy he left behind in the form of them his charity work and his advocacy will never be forgotten Bram I say this on behalf of programmers everywhere thank you you will be missed

Channel: ForrestKnight

Views: 14,625

Keywords: VIM, vim history, vi, text editor, ide, bram moolenaar, the making of vim, the history of vim, vi improved

Id: c6vjFQBlxvY

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023