It's always interesting how parallel development happens with certain things.

I certainly had no exposure to EMACS at the time I came up with the idea, nor the rest of this community you describe.

I'm not sure I like vim's coloring, actually. I find myself having to search for a nonexistent string just to get rid of it's highlighting of a search string.

On 11/15/2017 3:19 PM, Clem Cole wrote:


On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

When did EMACS start coloring things? 

​I'm fairly sure, Gosling EMACS could do color by '83 when we had it on the Masscomp systems.​  Cantrell's Teco was a year or two later always support color in some manner, because was a graphics guy at Masscomp (and DEC before that).

I'm dating this by, the fact I had left Berkeley by then.   PC or one of the HW folks  had written a set of EMACS macro's to emulate VMS's EDT for the ex-DEC HW guys which used color.   The MIT contingent was all EMACS, but we switched to Zimmerman's EMACS when we hired Steve I want to say in 84 or 85. I remember there was some heartache because Zimmerman EMACS was very close to ITS EMACS and preferred by the ex-MIT folks (unlike Gosling EMACS).   But the color stuff for EDT broke and there was complaining from the HW folks.  [Andy Tannenbaum, Eric Ginger and I were the die hard ed/vi folks - which in those days was BW - to this day even with vim, I still rarely use colors with that editor].