Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes

Re:Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes by jll29 on Monday October 09, 2023 @02:00PM (#37823240)

I'm curious: who invented gap buffers originally? Do we know if it was RMS? What was the first peer-reviewed publication describing or mentioning them?

A quick search brings up only references in the 1990s or later...

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Re:Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes by gumby on Monday October 09, 2023 @04:42PM (#37825245)

Emacs uses a gap buffer because TECO used one, long before RMS finished high school.

Emacs was initially just a bunch of macros (in Eugene Ciccarelli's TECO init file IIRC) that provided an easier interface to TECO once a realtime display mode (^R mode of course!) had been added.

Yes, in TECO, control R was a keyword in the language. If you don't know TECO it looks like line noise. For controlling an editor, that's not necessarily insane.

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Re:Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes by cbsmith on Monday October 09, 2023 @07:44PM (#37826874)

Yeah, gap buffers LONG predate RMS.

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Re:Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes by jwstarr on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @12:00AM (#37828390)

The author of TECO, Dan Murphy, wrote an article about its history for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. A PDF copy of the article is available here: https://opost.com/tenex/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf

Alas, it does not discuss the gap buffer.

The book The Craft of Text Editing claims the gap buffer technique was first used by TECO (http://www.finseth.com/craft/#c6.6), although this claim is given no support.

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Re:Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes by gumby on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @09:12AM (#37831625)

Thanks for that reference — I’d never seen it. I’ll be happy never to write any more TECO in my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested.

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