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Comment by jonjacky | Hacker News Reader

One of the original Unix creators, Doug McIlroy, credited with inventing pipes, wrote in [1]:

"... I have always detested emacs and vi. With ^D, ^C, and ^\, Unix has more than enough mystery chords to learn. Emacs and vi raised that number to a high power ...

... Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small means rather than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But evolution, including the evolution of Unix, does not work that way. ..."

The editors favored by the original Unix guys are ed, sam, and acme.

1. https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2014-August/006506.ht...

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This is somewhat silly. First, the mystery chords for the terminal only grew. And... Is kind of the reason to use a different editor.

Second, adding acme as a preferred editor throws the conceit by introducing the mouse to the chords.

I fully grant that chords with the mouse probably add a lot, especially after training. I struggle to see how "small means" can lead you to any one editor over another, though.

I can see that emacs (predating Unix) doesn't fit into the Unix philosophy (and I don't see a reason why it should -- it's first and foremost an editor, not a system tool), but

"The editors favored by the original Unix guys are ed, sam, and acme."

doesn't make any sense. vi was the VIsual interface to ed, so ed has all the mystery chords, just expects you to operate blindly.

Some of the original Bell Labs Unix people have a very austere view of the Unix philosophy.

In their view, it all started to go wrong -- Unix began to depart from the founding principles -- as early as 1978. In their view, Berkeley Unix does not follow their Unix philosophy -- they don't like network sockets, for example, whose design was mostly imported from some earlier non-Unix system (maybe Tenex?).

Some of this attitude appears in Rob Pike's 'Good, Bad and Ugly' talk from 2001 [1]. He says the early Unix tools approach had, by then, already been replaced for most users by big do-everything programs: Emacs, Perl, browsers...

1. http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

But you can use these chords inside the editor's terminal (for example (n)vim's :term), so it's easier to scroll back, search stuff and copy-paste, for example

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