Hacker News Reader

Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

OT:

I'd be interested to know where folding editors first originated?

We have org-mode now of course.

My first encounter was 28 years ago now - December 1989 - an in-house editor called Teddy written by "Burkhard" that we had running on Vax - for Parasolid development in Cambridge, UK - think it dated from 1987 or earlier.

View on HN

I'm think Engelbart's "Mother of all demos" included folding headings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

I think the first "popular" ones were made by Dave Winer (http://davewiner.com). Here's a list of some (http://outliners.scripting.com)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer says that the Inmos D700 Transputer Development System had a folding editor. That would have been in the early 1980s I think?

Then I remember David Lavender joining Parasolid in 1992 - not liking Teddy that much - a little bit of elisp later he had folds working in Emacs. *

So folds in Emacs date from at least 1992.

* It could occasionally create corrupt folded files though, which was annoying if he checked them in to the SCM.

Yes, 1992, by a classmate friend of mine Jamie Lokier!

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/folding.el

Dave Winer's http://outliners.scripting.com/ site has some interesting history. You can download the old programs there.

I remember using MORE on the Mac in the late '80s.

I haven't used org-mode, so I may be a bit unclear on exactly what is meant by folding editors. However, if we're talking about collapsing sections of text, I wonder if the oN-Line System (NLS) would qualify, as shown in Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "The Mother of All Demos" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&t=5m48s

Wikipedia claims IBM’s SPF in 1974 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_folding#History), using indentation to identify blocks (one may call that cheating, as folding would break down if the code wasn’t indented consistently, but for 1974, I wouldn’t hold it against them)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com