COFF July 2025

coff@tuhs.org

17 participants
6 discussions

by Will Senn

I remember having discussions about vi vs emacs in the mid 1990's. I'm curious if those were the first public wars about editors, or if y'all remember earlier flamewars on the subject? Maybe KEDIT vs EDIT? I grew up on DOS, so edlin vs edit was quite the battle ground in discussions, but I don't remember flames... I find the vi/emacs divide quite insurmountable. As a vi guy, I cannot even understand emac's appeal. I've tried countless times, even going emacs only for a while... when I went back to vi, it was like old shoes, very comfortable. I didn't get the flamewar at all - you do you... but I did and still do find the passion on either side endlessly fascinating. Two other debates are quite similar - one to do with spaces vs tabs, the other top-posting vs bottom-posting have provided me with hours of entertainment... I prefer tabs over spaces and top-posting, but I get the other points of view on these... Will

2 minutes

Re: editor wars

by Lars Brinkhoff

Paul Winalski writes: > The original version of EMACS was a set ot TECO macros. Yes, but not any TECO. The macros make heavy use of ITS TECO particulars. > TECO ran on TOPS-10, so the TECO macro version of EMACS ought to have > been able to run there, too. No, because TOPS-10 TECO was another flavor. > Or did EMACS depend on features of TECO not implemented on TOPS-10? Yes. Maybe a short history of TECO is in order. TECO started on the MIT RLE PDP-1. It was ported to the AI lab PDP-1, and made to use its display. When the AI lab traded the PDP-1 for a PDP-6, TECO was quickly rewritten for that machine. DEC engineer Bob Clements brought a copy of this PDP-6 TECO to Stanford when overseeing the installation of a PDP-6 here. He ported TECO to run on the PDP-6 Monitor and removed display features. He then brought this version of TECO back to DEC, where it because a popular editor across all of DEC's machines. This flavor of TECO was called Standard TECO. Since it developed from an an early and lobotimized TECO, it doesn't have a rich set of features. Meanwhile back at MIT, PDP-6 TECO was moved to ITS, still keeping the original display features. It developed quickly and acquired many features that never made it to DEC. EMACS eventually appeared as the culmination and merging of many display-oriented TECO macros. The combination of TECO and EMACS was ported to TOPS-20 and TENEX. By the way, there is an "EMACS-11" that runs on TECO-11, and I suppose that is a flavor of Standard TECO.

2 hours, 25 minutes

Not really Emacs wars (was: foreground/background vs. Windowing)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Somewhat off-topic for TUHS; please follow up at COFF] On Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 17:37:34 -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > > Also, there are no GUI emacs versions I like.. You have me curious. How many do you know? And what don't you like about them, when you clearly use Emacs? Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

2 hours, 28 minutes

Code/comment Ratios Style

by Warren Toomey

I've written my fair share of code and also taught several languages. I'd estimate my comment to total LOC ratio as about 1/4 to 1/3. But I keep coming across code bases where the ratio is closer to 1/100 and it really bugs me! I just can't read the codebase and work out the nuances of what it is doing. So this isn't a rant so much as a request for alternate perspectives. If you have a spartan commenting style, why? Can you read your code and see all the implications, or do you dislike lots of comments, or do you write more external documentation etc.? When I taught, I had two mantras about comments: Code explains how, comments explain why. Code as if the person who takes over your codebase is a crazed psychopath who knows where you live. Thanks! Warren

3 hours, 2 minutes

Re: COFF Digest, Vol 78, Issue 1

by Will Senn

Reminds me of one of my favorite editors - wordstar 3… George R.R. Martin used it to write the great bulk of his works! We still carry around more baggage from this editor (arguably word processor) than most folks know . Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 20, 2025, at 1:35 PM, coff-request(a)tuhs.org wrote: > > Send COFF mailing list submissions to > coff(a)tuhs.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via email, send a message with subject or > body 'help' to > coff-request(a)tuhs.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > coff-owner(a)tuhs.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of COFF digest..." > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski) > 2. Re: editor wars (Warner Losh) > 3. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski) > 4. Re: editor wars (Lars Brinkhoff) > 5. Re: editor wars (Lars Brinkhoff) > 6. Re: editor wars (Paul Winalski) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 11:43:10 -0400 > From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> > Subject: [COFF] Re: editor wars > To: coff(a)tuhs.org > Message-ID: > <CABH=_VSdx+ySq5VKrRY5d-dzdVfQ1PgBh0J4A4mFS+t-R0MX1w(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: multipart/alternative; > boundary="000000000000095b69063a5e382b" > >> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 10:02 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I remember having discussions about vi vs emacs in the mid 1990's. I'm >> curious if those were the first public wars about editors, or if y'all >> remember earlier flamewars on the subject? >> > > I recall the editor flame wars going on in the Usenet and ARPAnet world > during the 1980s. Mainly in the Human Factors Usenet group. Within DEC's > software engineering groups the debate (not a flame war) was between TECO > and EDT. > > I remember one amusing (to me) incident in the vi vs. emacs flame wars. > Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction author, was one of the early adopters > of the home PC. He wrote a column on PCs for Byte magazine and set himself > up as a computer pundit. We professional software engineers, who worked on > "real" computers, not those feeble PC toys, held him in polite contempt. > > Then came the tragic day when AOL started carrying Usenet newsgroups. I > say tragic because there was a major culture clash between the AOL user > community and the Usenet community. Usenet messages were propagated for > the most part over low-speed dial-up connections between the various > servers. Terseness and brevity were therefore highly valued. AOl, on the > other hand, had centralized servers and, since they charged their customers > based on connect time, encouraged verbosity and garrulous writing style. > > So Pournelle got Usenet access. His professional scientific training was > in operations research and human factors, so it wasn't long before he > discovered the Human Factors Usenet group. The HF group was in the middle > of a particularly viscous vi vs. emacs flame war at the time. Pournelle > stuck his nose in and posted that his editor of preference was Electric > Pencil. This triggered a discussion about Pournelle, along the lines of: > "Who is this bozo?" "He's Jerry Pournelle, the lousy SF writer who thinks > he knows something about computers." Both sides of the editor flame war > dropped their differences and started flaming Pournelle. I don't recall > ever seeing Pournelle post on Usenet again. > > -Paul W. >

17 hours, 10 minutes

Personal Preference vs Group Productivity (was Re: [TUHS] Re: End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference))

by Dan Cross

[TUHS to Bcc; Cc'ed to COFF to redirect for follow-ups] On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 8:24 AM Christian Hopps <chopps(a)chopps.org> wrote: > Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes: > > I wasn't trying to tell Will he can't use whatever editor he wants, I was > > trying to tell Will I wouldn't tolerate this much back and forth about his > > personal preferences distracting us from shipping product. My team had > > emacs people and vi people, nobody cared so long as you got your job done. > > > > What we didn't have is editor arguments clogging up our thinking. > > To jump in here before everyone poo poos this thread too much. I agree with this sentiment when it's time to get work done. > > That said, I've enjoyed this thread b/c I like getting other peoples perspectives, especially from folks that I think have some clue. Sometimes I learn something new or a new perspective and I end up adapting new tools or practices b/c of it -- even now that my beard/hair is grey. > > I find these are actually fun conversations to have occasionally -- maybe in a cafe/bar or even on a mailing list. Maybe not everyday or all the time, but sometimes. :) I think some folks may have interpreted Larry's statements as stating that, if you worked for him, you used the tools he mandated. But I don't think that's what he meant (at least not about text editors), and I think that your interpretation is correct: use whatever works for you, but don't waste a bunch of other people's time pushing the virtunes of your preferred tools on those who already have things that work for them. I think that's fair. That said, there is a qualitative difference between the sort of banter people may bat around over lunch, and someone seriously trying to get everyone else to use their preferred editor (editors are just one example, though interesting in this regard because choosing them seems to be such a deeply personal thing). I think the discussions on these mailing lists are closer to the former than the latter, and as long as it remains friendly, I really don't see any harm in that. But this got me thinking that surely there are decisions made on a project basis, where individual preference by itself is not, and cannot be, the deciding factor for use. Perhaps the most obvious is code-formatting styles, but others may be choice of build tool, revision control system, implementation language, and so on. Where does one draw the line between the tools an individual chooses for their own use, and those mandated by the group? I suspect there is no one, good, universal answer. Take implementation language as an example: "I'll write my part in C, you write yours in FORTRAN..." sounds highly suspect at first, but _might_ make sense if "I'm" tasked with writing the IO part and "you're" taking on the numerical bits and have to interface with a numerical library written in Fortran. Indeed, I've found that when people try to define some kind of general rule for deciding this or that, they tend to be trying to simplify really complex things in a very superficial way that's not reflective of actual practice. But maybe there is some utility in thinking about this generally. Perhaps a reasonable first-order approximation for finding a dividing line might be taken from the answer to the question, "is this something that really only impacts me, or is it going to have an impact on my peers, as well?" Editors sort of make sense here; by and large, as long as I can use the tools effectively, my peers aren't going to be impacted if I use tool A to enter text versus tool B. Similarly with whether I prefer light text on a darker background, or dark text on a lighter background, what font I use, type size, what window manager I use, and so on. But on the other hand, if I demanded that I be able to use My preferred code formatting style regardless of what the rest of the code used, then that _does_ have an impact on those around me, so deserves more thought. And _that's_ the kind of thing that people can argue about endlessly until finally someone just makes a decision. I've said this before, but Google's style guides were a great case in point here. To be honest, I didn't like them and thought that the resulting code was ugly. But after a few weeks, I just stopped noticing that, and I had to admit that they were a great aid in being able to approach a codebase with billions of LOC in it. When `clang-format` came along and took out a lot of the tedium of making your code conform to the style guide, it really freed up a lot of mental capacity to start thinking about real problems, design, and so on, and not just where the braces went. But that was all predicated on someone just Making a Decision. > FWIW for coding/email/organizing/scheduling I now use some franken-setup project called "spacemacs" which is emacs, but the UI of vi, launching much faster, that uses a meta-configuration that makes it simple to enable all those features (and yes I still write lisp when needed but that's almost never to get what I want anymore). > > For quick editing I still just type `vi` and use ^Z, even though I also use tmux and long running disconnected remote sessions. Personally, I've found it very helpful to maintain some level of proficiency in a variety of different text editors, using different tools for different things. Part of this is the whole, "when in Rome, do as Romans do..." sort of thing: I'm not looking for `vi` on VMS or Multics or VM/CMS or something, but I'll also happily use emacs to write Lisp, and on plan 9, I'll use sam or acme for C or troff or whatever. On my Mac, Zed or VSCode work pretty well. On remote Unix machines, a lot of the kids are hip on this "Helix" thing these days. Speaking of plan 9.... One nice thing about a system that embraces true resource sharing is that, when one can construct an environment that contains the set of all the resources one needs to work with and then one can bring one's local toolset to bear on those resources. Plan 9, where resources are represented by files in mutable namespaces, really exemplifies this, which is distinct from a more "remote access" model, where I use something like ssh or mosh or telnet to login to a remote system. In the remote access model, I'm constrained by whatever tools are available on a remote system. So if I'm logging into some remote server over SSH or something, it's handy to know whatever editor may be on the distant end. It's a shame more systems aren't like plan 9 in this way, but they aren't, and for better or worse, I've still got to use them, and it's so much less personally aggravating to care deeply about what tools are available in that context. - Dan C.

17 hours, 54 minutes

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