[TUHS] Re: Early Unix and Keyboard Skills

On Sun, Aug 06, 2023 at 04:51:04PM +0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote: I remember Stevie. In my early days at Sun, on 4MB machines, I was working on log files about the size of memory so the machine swapped like crazy just to take a look. I looked at Stevie but then settled on xvi. I changed the libc string functions to treat \n as well as \0 as a string terminator, changed how xvi read in a file to use mmap() instead. It wasn't really that hard but then I had a vi clone that could work on files twice as large with no swapping. The read only path was super easy to do, I made the write path work as well, that took a little tinkering because you couldn't modify the lines in place (think changing case on a line which xvi was happy to do in place but I couldn't because I'd be changing the file data which means :q! wouldn't do what you wanted). It's of little interest now but at the time, it was a huge win for me, I was working on performance and looking at log files was a big part of that. Most of us remember what it was like to work on a working set that was bigger than memory, it sucked.