I appreciate the effort that went into writing the article but it conflates different concepts missing some historical context and technical distinctions.

For example, TUI (text user interface) and CLI (command-line interface) are quite different. "CLI Text Editor" sounds more like someone editing a file using ECHO commands.

This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991. At that time, VIM was still very new, so "VIM memes" weren't yet part of the tech landscape.

Before VIM, there was vi. In Usenet posts - about 15 years before Google - people used to add a pithy humorous sentence at the bottom called "tagline" - here is one: "How do you exit vi? Reboot the system."

And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs. We've had EDIT, DR-DOS EDITOR, Brief, WordPad, EditPad, Notepad++, and more.

> This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991

MS-DOS 5 EDIT is actually just a stub which runs QBASIC in editor mode, in which all the BASIC-related features are disabled.

Windows 95 EDIT was different, it actually had BASIC removed from the binary. I don't know if it was a rewrite or if they just deleted (or even #ifdef-ed) out the BASIC parts out of the source code.

QBASIC was basically just a cut-down build of QuickBASIC with some features disabled. The TUI part was provided by the "Character Windows" (aka "Character-Oriented Windows", CW or COW) library, a TUI-mode analog to the Windows 3.x API for DOS TUI apps, it was also used by some other Microsoft products such as Word for DOS. It would be great were Microsoft to open source it (although from what I've heard, significant chunks of this stuff have already been included in various leaks of DOS and Windows source code, but it would be nice to have it publicly available in a completely kosher way)

I've long quit using vim on a daily basis, but the "how to exit Vim?" jokes are still somehow funny. A recent encounter was an old tweet by @iamdeveloper: "I've been using Vim for about 2 years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it."

:wq (sorry, I had to).

Before vim was vi. Befote vi was ex. (Before ex was ed - the first editor for unix)

Vim has ex built in - `Q` in normal mode to enter Ex mode, 3-5 command lines will show at the bottom and you can Ex away. I don't know of practical uses, I've only done it for the novelty.

Obligatory: To exit Ex mode use `:vi[sual]` - and that's probably where Vi got its name.

I noticed the conflation of terms too but it seems to arise out of the original Microsoft announcement!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-...

The term CLI has just come to mean "in a terminal" for a certain subculture, e.g. https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps

People do know the technical difference, it's just a shorthand

> This new editor is actually a reimplementation of the classic MS-DOS 5 EDIT program from 1991.

I remember editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT in that thing as well as writing my own BAT files and QBASIC.

Does the exclamation point work in vi, like vim? So the way to exit is to do:

:!killall vi

Of course.

For a cli text editor, ed would qualify, right?

Interestingly enough, the weird re-boosting to get more views thing that Hacker News sometimes does is making it seem like I said all of that 5 hours ago.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310682

Instead of 2 days ago when I actually wrote it. (-:

Don't forget MicroEmacs! I've been using it ever since it floated around usenet in 1985 or so.

In Usenet posts - about 15 years before Google - people used to add a pithy humorous sentence at the bottom called "tagline"

We always called them "signatures." They were even stored in a file named .sig.

TUI (text user interface)

I find it interesting that everyone is using TUI when I've always seen CUI (Character User Interface). I come from a DOS and Windows background, and it seems like TUI comes from the *nix world.

And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs.

Dr Dobbs and other tech magazines used to have ads for a variety of editors. And linkers, which were the bane of 80s programmers' lives. There was a whole era of programmer-oriented software that seems to have been largely forgotten.

I came here to pick the first of those nits, too. A concrete example that sums it up: sed is a command-line text editor; nano is a TUI text editor.

You’re missing ‘ed’ (and its predecessor ‘qed’) which is actually a CLI text editor.

you forgot EDLIN

I forgot how the punchline is phrased, so apologies for the atrocious delivery, but I like the one about “I do all my coding in VIM, because I don’t know how to exit VIM”