That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

quote by Bill Joy
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I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away.

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I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

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I think the hard thing about all these tools is that it takes a fair amount of effort to become proficient.

quote by Bill Joy
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The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands.

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I remember right after Carter got elected, I was sitting in my apartment in Albany, CA, on a Saturday listening to people call Carter and ask stupid questions while I designed the screen editor.

quote by Bill Joy
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So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

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I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

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