Today's topic is about using a editor, Vim.

And yeah, I will start out with a bit of history, but in general, this is a difficult topic.

So we discussed if this makes sense, because just the single talk, Vim is a very complicated

tool.

You only can scratch at the surface.

And so I, this is the first time I give this talk, and I hope it is useful to you.

And I would ask for your feedback then afterwards.

So because I'm not sure if this really works out, but we will see.

Okay.

So as always, if you listened to one of my talks before, I'm a great fan of historic

background or just where things come from, especially for computer science.

And so also, I cannot spare you from some history.

So where it all started is the at line editor.

This was created by Ken Thompson.

So one of the old ones, the Unix environment in 1969.

So at the very beginning of the Unix development, and I mean, clearly when you want to create

an operating system, you need an editor.

So apart from a assembler or a compiler, you needed an editor.

As you can see in the image here on the right hand side, computers at that time, not necessarily

or didn't have screen.

So the interface to the computer to get an answer was the teleprompter.

So it printed out lines.

And you can imagine that to create an editor for such a hostile, not user friendly environment

is a difficult task.

Someone quoted that ad is possibly the most user hostile editor ever created.

I didn't use it, but interestingly, it's still around.

So when you are on Mac OS or on Linux, that is there.

So you can try it and torture yourself.

In 1976, Bill Joy, some of you may know him.

He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

And he was for a lot of years the CTO at Sun Microsystems, created the X line editor.

This was at UC Berkeley.

And well, he tried to make it more user friendly.

And at this point, he also created a new mode, a so-called visual mode.

And so in the beginning, VI was just a different mode in X. Just later, I think in 1979, this

special mode was offered as a separate command, so the VI command, which then took you straight

into this visual mode.

The X mode is still around.

So VI and of course also VIM have this X mode still there.

And of course, also the X line editor is still available on all the Unix clones still today.

In 1991, Bram Molina came up with a version of VIM.

He called it VI improved.

It wasn't called improved in the beginning, but later on, they changed it to improved.

This was based on Stevie.

That was an ST editor, stands for ST editor for VI enthusiasts.

And it was created in 1987 for the Atari ST.

And also Bram Molina in the beginning developed it on Amiga.

And over the years, VIM turned out or is now by far the most popular VI clone.

And of course, it can still be used as the original VIM, as the original VI, but it superseded

it in a lot of ways.