126
votes
Accepted
Why is Ctrl-V the Paste shortcut?
As well as being close to X and C on most keyboard layouts, “V” is reminiscent of the caret used in proofreading to indicate the insertion point for new text, e.g.
text to be inserted
V
...
- 118k
46
votes
Accepted
Correct pronunciation of `vi` (Unix editor)?
vi is pronounced as the two separate letters, /ˌviːˈaɪ/ (in English); listen to the same Brian Kernighan (also re-confirming the ed pronunciation).
Vim’s pronunciation is explicitly documented:
Vim ...
- 118k
25
votes
Correct pronunciation of `vi` (Unix editor)?
From An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi, by the people who wrote vi, William Joy and
Mary Ann Horton:
This document provides a quick introduction to
vi. (Pronounced vee-eye.)
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22
votes
Accepted
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
There were many editors available for DOS, both standalone and included in development environments. I suspect that most developers using IDEs used their IDE’s built-in editor; those were perhaps the ...
- 118k
22
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
WordStar was one of the earliest and most popular word processing programs for CP/M and MS-DOS. One of the key features for a lot of people was the non-document mode. This did a few important things:
...
17
votes
Accepted
Which are the earliest real-time text editors?
I think the following early text editors meet your criteria:
Brian Tolliver’s TVEdit (Stanford, 1965), based on Doug Engelbart’s earlier word processor; see On-line Text Editing: a Survey:
TVEDIT ...
- 118k
15
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
My favorite editor as a professional programmer in the DOS enthronement was E. The OP is mistaken in saying that E was not available until the 90s. True, it was not included with PC DOS until 1993, ...
- 8,673
11
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I remember that in the late 1980s Multi-Edit for MS-DOS was quite popular.
- 18.3k
11
votes
Accepted
Why were TECO variables called Q-registers?
It's really more of a conjecture, but if it is considered suitable as an answer:
Already in early TECO, the letter q ("quantity") was used to retrieve the value of a register. That might have been ...
- 26.1k
10
votes
Why were TECO variables called Q-registers?
TLDR: TECO uses single-character commands. When extending TECO to
add registers to store numeric values, there was a limited set of
unused characters left for the commands associated with this
...
- 24.7k
8
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
If you came from CP/M then you were familiar with Wordstar.
Turbo Pascal used the same keys as Wordstar, so it was also a popular editor (as you can already see from the comments) for everything that ...
- 26.1k
7
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Lexicon
Lexicon was a text editor / word processor MS-DOS program that was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and Russia at the end of 1980s and in 1990s. Some estimate that Lexicon was illegally ...
- 79
6
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
My favorite text editor, until Windows 7 rendered it unusable, was PC-Write 3.01, a shareware program for which I purchased the manual.
I don't know how many other people used it, but it ran quickly ...
- 34.7k
6
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
WordPerfect was the leading word processor from roughly 1986 to 1993, with 60% market share at its peak. (The previous leading word processor was WordStar.) It was available for many other operating ...
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5
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I have always preferred the Norton Editor. Over the years I have investigated many other text editors and I have always returned to the Norton Editor.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ...
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5
votes
Which are the earliest real-time text editors?
You might be interested to read about the oNLine-System developed throughout the 1960s and demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in The Mother Of All Demos (demonstrated Dec 1968), which I believe ...
- 51
4
votes
Which versions of TECO had merged G- and Q-registers?
Partial answer. The ones I know that have Q and G refer to the same register are:
PDP-6 TECO. See https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/its-archives/blob/master/ailab/pdp6-memo-2.pdf and AI memo 81 ...
- 3,101
4
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Many have already mentioned WordStar but no one has mentioned Galaxy, which I used extensively in the late 80s (87-89). I found it better than WordStar, as (to me) it seemed easier to use and more ...
- 3,349
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I started on PC-DOS in 1985.
The word processor first used was MultiMate and then Word - the DOS version. I was a programmer so not really writing letters etc. Then I used Windows 1 Write
Most of my ...
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3
votes
How can I save a custom level in Daisy’s Garden 2 in a DGF file?
I have installed the shareware version of Daisy's Garden 2 within Windows NT 4 under VirtualBox. In this environment the game runs too slowly to be playable, but I have not experienced any difficulty ...
- 6,925
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
Personally, I used Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Using the same keystrokes saved a lot of time when context switching. Turbo Pascal was one of my first serious programming languages. I Wrote a custom ...
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
The text editor within Borland Sidekick was great. At the end of the 80s, I was developing a Lisp-based add-in for AutoCAD (around 500 kloc of Lisp) and having a TSR editor at my fingertips was a ...
- 611
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
As a young teen I was using XTree and later XTree Gold on my 286 from 1989 onward.
It was a file commander but had an Editor as well, which was very handy. I spend many hours "shortening" ...
- 400
3
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
I used to use edit.com that came with MS-DOS 6.22 and looked a lot like Q-Basic. I also used WordStar for MS-DOS a little bit but mainly edit.com because it was easily accessible.
1
vote
PC DOS E Editor (3.13v): "Not enough memory" error with a file of 1.65 MB and 40 320 lines, even with the /S switch
MS-DOS edit also had trouble with text files as small as a few hundred KB in my experience.
When you think about the technical problems involved, and the difficulty of memory management in DOS it's ...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible