Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim

Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by kaycebasques on Friday September 15, 2023 @01:23PM (#37526363)

The naming tradition interests me. Some of the name changes are incremental: ed, then em, then en, then ex. Others seem like a dramatic break: e* to vi. I'm getting the sense that it was a more common tradition than I realized. Of course the classic example is C to C++, which is just so dang satisfying. Are there other interesting examples of incremental name changes and more fundamental shifts (e* to vi)?

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Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by cbm-vic-20 on Friday September 15, 2023 @01:49PM (#37526695)

:vi is the ex command to switch to visual mode.

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Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by WorldMaker on Monday September 18, 2023 @07:51PM (#37563845)

Relatedly, for all those that ever wondered why all the commands in vim that start with : are called "ex commands" in the documentation, it's that weird stack of ex was always inside vi and vice versa, vi was always inside of ex.

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Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by tokyolights2 on Friday September 15, 2023 @01:54PM (#37526770)

In unix the names of things are just based on what stuck and what was used. My favorite example of name evolution is the jump from `more` to `less` (because less is more...)

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Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by pluijzer on Friday September 15, 2023 @02:18PM (#37527119)

Not my favorite language but I like how C# is C++++ (even though in musical terms C# would be inbetween C and C++).

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Re:Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim by layer8 on Friday September 15, 2023 @03:21PM (#37527963)

Arguably you only need two pluses to form a hash symbol.

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