The first code file I ever edited was a BASIC program from a programmers mag onto my TRS-80. (sure there are many badges of honor but this is where my story begins). A little later on I was using edlin on an IBM 5150. (hater’s gonna hate but that’s the first model number I remember but it was the first IBM PC with dual floppies and no CD-ROM).

I used edlin to code IBM’s BASIC, Fortran and COBOL.

I do not have a complete understanding of the history of console text editors but the one truth I have:

• vi is really good on slow networks as the keystrokes are well suited
• vi recovers from network reconnects or system crashes
• vi has a lot of the modern functions like syntax highlighting
• vi can edit very large files
• vi is typically installed on most *nix OS.

vim seems to be a fork of vi and vi is almost forgotten.

I just some tweaking with midnight commander. It’s a filemanager with an editor but nothing special. Honorable mention goes to pico, nano, joe, jim, jed and maybe a few others I do not recall.

While I happen to like syntax highlighting and some more IDE functions it’s not really important for the technology pandemic… ah thought I forgot… NOPE.

The micro editor is not bad but it is incomplete. It’s written in go and the code is almost easy to read but there are others.

moving on.