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by baldfat 3337 days ago
Your wrong in terms of how VIM came about and name.

VIM originally meant "Vi IMitation". It wasn't till 1993 that it became "Vi Improved."

Actually VIM is not a direct fork of VI. VIM comes from Stevie editor from Atari ST and Amiga days. (I actually started with Stevie).

Here is the tree from ed to VIM

ed > Bill Joy and company then made em > en > ex AKA vi

Joy left development of VI in June 1979 and joined corporate life working with BSD.

vi (Unix\BSD) > Stevie editor (Atari ST) > VIM (Amiga)

Then chaos hit. From 1981 onward clones and implementations were incompatible and progress kind of grind to a halt due to license. That is when Stevie editor hit and then when Bram Moolenaar made VIM. He reimplimented it for Amiga and added features one being plugins. Vi had no plugins and very little customization.

Here is why your analogy is wrong: LICENSING "While commercial vendors could work with Bill Joy's codebase (and continue to use it today), many people could not. Because Joy had begun with Ken Thompson's ed editor, ex and vi were derivative works and could not be distributed except to people who had an AT&T source license."

So it is not at all like this fork. I find that people have taken sides without even knowing the history of VIM and make assumptions.

2 comments

I think the reason people are downvoting you is that after the (interesting) historical detour, you say "it is not at all like this fork" when in fact it is still exactly like this fork as far as the main point of the parent post is concerned.

Due to _________ we are making a clone of this other product, but one that fixes ________, and therefore we are also attempting to co-opt the name a cutesy way so that people understand this is supposed to be, while not exactly the same thing, an equivalent thing (but with __________ fixed).

> Due to ________ we are making a clone of this other product,

LICENSING (owned by AT&T the Oracle/Apple Grand Daddy of lawsuits in the 80s and 90s) and it was a port on an unsupported operating system, Amiga OS.

Also it was a clone of Stevie more so then Vi.

> but one that fixes ________

Vi TO RUN ON AMIGA OS (ADDED PLUGINS and CUSTOMIZED SHORTCUTS plus many other features not found in VI.)

Nothing in Neovim especially looking at VIM 8.0 is added but it is a refactoring with compatibility of plug ins with a cleaner code base.

I feel like people on NeoVIM side never really read the primary fights about the patch or understood why BDLF took a stand for a code more to his liking.

So I guess by the down vote you think I posted something factually wrong? Or you don't care to learn about it.