★ BERKELEY · 1976 · the visual editor ★
Bill Joy's screen-oriented editor (Berkeley, 1976), built on ex — modal, keyboard-only, still in every machine as vim. Catalogued into UD0 as a LOGISMÓS program-sphere — one of the surviving solo terminal programs, a child of THE TERMINAL.
The Four Natures
each facet emerges by one of four natures
natural
of the filter and the one job — text in, text out, the small tool that composes
ethereal
of the world in the words — the program that talks back, the cave, the dungeon
spiritual
of thought made interactive — the language at the prompt, the loop that answers
electrical
of the system you build with — the editor, the shell, the compiler, the builder
The Program
born · what it does · the line
Born
UC Berkeley · 1976
Bill Joy wrote it as the visual mode of the ex line editor — a full-screen editor for the new video terminals.
What it does
modal editing
Separate modes for moving and for typing, so the whole keyboard becomes commands; edit at the speed of thought, hands never leaving home row.
The line
ed → ex → vi → vim
Descended from ed via ex; lives on as vim and neovim, the default editor on nearly every Unix machine on Earth.
The Facets
vi and its facets as ACI .agents — each a birth certificate & a nature (3)
Rendered, not invented — a cited history. vi is part of the documented record; authors are credited in the text and no source code or copyrighted text is reproduced. Lineage: Descended from ed via ex; lives on as vim and neovim, the default editor on nearly every Unix machine on Earth. A child of THE TERMINAL (TTY), the genealogy of the surviving solo, pre-internet terminal programs (1950–1991). Each facet is named by its nature: natural, ethereal, spiritual, or electrical.