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by markmontymark
4324 days ago
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"Vi, vim, emacs or edlin? No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the program." Hmm... I've used :x to write+quit in Vim for years. And, :X is to encrypt+quit. Don't have a year when that was added though. Could be fun to try and dig that up. |
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:x (short for :xit) was in the original ex written by Bill Joy in 1976. According to Joy[1], ex pulled together ideas from a few different places:
1. em from QMC, written by George Coulouris[2]
2. a modified version of ed from UCLA
3. An early version of ex written by Charles Haley based on the em source in 1976
4. Bill Joy himself
em uses 'x' for its interactive find-and-replace mode ("exchange"), so it didn't originate there. That leaves 2, 3, and 4 as possible origins. I can't find anything on the UCLA ed. If the origins are in 3 or 4, :x is from 1976.
[1] http://roguelife.org/~fujita/COOKIES/HISTORY/1BSD/exrefm.pdf
[2] http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~gc/history/