Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2018 04:06:30 +0700 Robert Elz <address@hidden> wrote:
Robert Elz writes:
>     Date:        Sun, 18 Mar 2018 13:47:24 -0400
>     From:        David Levine <address@hidden>
>     Message-ID:  <address@hidden>
> 
> 
>   | The precendence in order from high to low is:  1) editor
>   | component, 2) VISUAL, 3) EDITOR.
> 
> Actually, just to be precise, before those comes the -editor
> switch to the program (comp, repl, etc).
> 
> I too have had an "editor" component in $MH_PROFILE
> for a very very long time now, and had no idea that the
> default editor had been switched away from prompter
> (and I am glad to hear it has been switched back) - but
> I have continued to use prompter from time to time,
> especially with "repl" via the -editor switch (-ed) when
> the reply is going to be something very simple, like "OK"
> It is much easier & quicker to drive than any real editor
> for things like that.
> 
> I also suspect that many of you do not recall using MH
> back when the only real alternative editors to prompter
> were not vi or emacs (or semi-clones to one of those)
> but ed or Rand's 'e' and a few others similar (em from
> QMC for example) - I don't think ex is quite as old as
> MH (and vi certainly is not, not even as an ex cmd.)

Bill Joy wrote vi in 1976 while at UCB. I believe MH came
later. Initially I used vi and Mail but later switched to e
and mh -- may be because @ Fortune we now had Dave Yost and
Rick Kiessig they'd both worked at Rand and on at least the
Rand Editor.  From what I recollect, more people used Mail
than MH and I believe the $EDITOR/$VISUAL convention for
calling an editor was well established. But it is possible
MH picked this up much later.