My Favorite Editor is the Butterfly, What's Yours?

XEDIT. Followed by xx by Blair Thompson,

Of course in my day we used to defrag hard disks by editing the inodes by hand, with magnets. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well, we had it *tough*... (Vale Tim Brooke Taylor)

TECO. Before these newfangled hard disks.

Yep - small edits with a hand punch.

I learned reading the Elliott 803 error messages from the hole patterns.

Deleting a character was trivial, inserting one usually required cut and tape.

There was the aggravation of figuring out whether a particular 5-bit code was "in" letter or figure shift.

I strongly recommend visiting TNMoC, at sometime in the indefinite future, to see and hear a working 803. And to discuss its implementation with the staff, while looking at the schematics :)

May its name be cursed :)

My 28-year-old son is a confirmed VIM bigot. Editor loyalties clearly aren't hereditary. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Reason almost doesn't factor into choice of editors anyway. :) For its day, XEDIT was pretty great.

Not VIM, real VI. VIM is merely a reasonable substitute on Windows platform s.

Enjoy, ed

I never did that with hard disks, but as a 6th former I /did/ do the equivalent with paper tape using one of these:

But I only had 5 channel paper tape. I thought I'd left the abomination of letter-shift figure-shift back in the bad old days.

Then android/iphone touch screens resurrected the concept :(

AFAIK no distro ships any VI other than VIM.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The repair kit is too complicated: We used plain sticky tags to connect the tape ends and punched the missing holes with the hand punch like that in the repair kit.

Distro of what? Debian Linux includes at least elvis-tiny and nvi.

Personally I prefer Emacs.

I misspoke mildly. Ed was wanting vanilla VI, which AFAICT nobody ships anymore.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

yes, and I miss it. VIM is a reasonable substitute. EMACS to me seemed like learning the piano. so many keystrokes!. Ed