The POSIX specification of vi

If you think about it, it's a cheap book on sed too.

I actually use "COPY CON" a fair amount. Also a decent amount of "cat > foo.sh".

I did my high school typewriting test in PC skills using edlin, and never ever used it again.

For coding in MS-DOS, I was using Borland IDEs, and there was the nice Q programmers editor as well.

Thanks, appreciate the feedback

Once you're the slightest but comfortable navigating vi, I highly recommend Practical Vim. [0] It tooke me a few days to get through, but I'm 100% in vim these days and more effective in it than in my old primary editor PyCharm.

[0]: https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...

I learned vi(m) using https://vim-adventures.com/. It's $25 US for a 6-month license, which is a bit short. But I felt I got my money's worth out of it and continue to use and love vi(m) to this day.

Thank you! It’s an unfinished project of mine. Still looking at adding more levels and allowing users to upload their own.

I agree! I am just working the containerization of the vim instances. Right now using k8, but wasting $$$ on infra. Moving to cloudflare containers to save that $$$ and make it more available. In the mean time, temporary email sites are allowed and not black listed.

> Are they actually UNIX Conformant? That PDF just says they've entered a trademark license agreement. They're not listed in the conformance database.

They were an official UNIX – https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm – but they aren't any more.

To be an official UNIX, you need to both pass the test suite and pay the trademark license fee. And the license fee needs to be renewed once every X years. And if you don't pay the renewal, you are no longer an official UNIX, even if you still pass all the tests.

This is why Solaris is no longer an official UNIX – someone at Oracle decided paying UNIX trademark license fees was a waste of money, so they stopped – and hence Solaris is no longer officially UNIX any more.

An I'm pretty sure the same thing happened with Huawei EulerOS. Probably someone at Huawei realised that zero customers cared whether EulerOS was officially "UNIX", and hence decided that paying the renewal was a waste of money. And they are probably right about that. 30 years ago, being officially "UNIX" or not could be a deal-breaker, nowadays I doubt a single customer cares.

FWIW, OS X uses vim so if any of the conformance tests check, it can be made to pass.

Solaris, AIX, and probably everyone else use the BSD/AT&T vi.

Somebody spent time and money to make vim posix-compliant: https://vimhelp.org/vi_diff.txt.html#posix

>mbox should die;

Mbox is useful for backups and for migration between different email systems (that use different databases internally). Mbox is also fine if you only have a hundred or so email folders and only process a few dozen emails a day, say for personal use (e.g. Thunderbird or k9).

I agree that mbox is not okay for large scale mail servers. Maildir+ works much better in such cases.

> Emacs was born on mainframes and made its way to UNIX much later, after vi had already become the standard.

Berkeley released the first version of vi in 1978–development had started in 1976 but I don't believe pre-1978 versions were released publicly. The first versions of Unix for Emacs (James Gosling's implementation, and Warren Montgomery's implementation, developed independently of each other) were released in 1981. But I don't think that three year head start was the biggest factor here.

I think a much bigger factor was the fact that vi came with BSD Unix for free, while Gosling Emacs was being sold as a commercial product (although also freely available under rather restrictive terms); I'm not sure what terms Montgomery Emacs (from Bell Labs) was available under, but it soon evolved into CCA Emacs (a commercial product). Free very often beats commercial. The first release of GNU Emacs wasn't until 1985.

And then another major factor was that in 1983, AT&T decided to make vi part of UNIX System V. I think the reasons they decided against Emacs included the fact that they could get vi for free from Berkeley, whereas the most popular Unix Emacs implementations in 1983 they'd have to pay licensing fees for commercial use. Montgomery Emacs was developed by Bell Labs so they owned that, but it was relatively primitive and obscure; CCA Emacs was derived from Montgomery's, but had rewritten all the code so no longer was under Bell Labs copyright; GNU Emacs likewise started out as a modified version of Gosling's Emacs and then escaped Gosling's copyright by rewriting all his code, but in 1983 it wasn't an option yet, and its (proto-GPL) licensing terms likely would have been too scary for AT&T's lawyers anyway.

This. Emacs came from GNU which GNU is not Unix; Emacs it's a tool to give Unix users freedoom (and a Lisp, OFC) from the Lisp Machines RMS used to use. Also, Emacs it's really huge, the closes to a "Posix Emacs" would be mg, as it's included under the OpenBSD base, but sadly it doesn't support Unicode. If it supported it, tons of Emacs users would use it as a quick editing tool, as 'mg' still launchers faster than 'emacs -nw -Q'.

And, as you said, Emacs and Lisp were for big machines, and Emacs it's like psychodelic/progressive rock: something to freely experiment creatively without machine restrictions. If you improvise "live", as jazz masters do (Lisp Machines), the better.

Unix would be like techno music from Kraftwerk: simple but well made beats and samples -machine made-, repetitive, they sound automated. But once they are put together they create something new and brilliant. Some people remix these samples and they create crazy stuff like the songs of The Avalanches, too. Kinda like Unix orthogonality between small tools and pipes.

Very different philosophies, but mixing GNU (Unix clone) and Emacs (Emacs from ITS was distinct from GNU Emacs) created something really powerful. For instance, you could automate mail and usenet fetching and sending data in the background with daemons (freeing resources for Emacs and unblocking I/O) and hack the frontend/parsing code like crazy, Or Telega, with telega and telega-server as the daemon to talk with Telegram, or even something like Mu and Mu4e for Email. Or simply, EMMS calling mpv in the background for audio and video playing -you can watch movies fom Emacs- (and mpv itself to yt-dlp for online videos) seamlessly.

In the art world, that would be like industrial music, a mix between automatization and improvisation, and, FFS, Ministry and some Prodigy songs were 100x better than Techno subgenres and every Hair Rock and Heavy Metal band with the same poses and tropes everywhere...