See this article that talks about Turbo c/c++ from the late 1980's as things used to be. Ah the good old days...

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5358258/Revisiting-Borland-Turbo-C-Cplusplus-A-Great-IDE-b

Ah yes.. the good old days 👀 Before I was even a sperm cell

I came into turbo a few versions deeper so it had at least some features, but it was so bad that at times I used ms-dos edit (which had mouse support) and just opened turbo to build. Thing is that everything was bad. Until dos went away in 95, it was all very, very bad -- so bad that even mac was a contender as possibly better for a couple of years.

Did quite some Turbo Pascal (and later Delphi) back in the days 😂

Until dos went away in 95, it was all very, very bad

You should have been around when mechanical teletypes were used at 110baud! Think variations of ms-dos edlin for editing text (program) files...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin

Until dos went away in 95, it was all very, very bad You should have been around when mechanical teletypes were used at 110baud! Think variations of ms-dos edlin for editing text (program) files... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin

The first "programmable" computer that I got my hands on was a C64. One had to enter the program "line by line" from the command prompt. Only way to see the lines that you had already entered was the LIST command. And, if the program didn't fit on a single screen, you had to press BREAK at the exactly right moment, in order to stop the listing at the place that you were interested in 🙄

(Not to mention that saving or loading your program to/from Datasette took ages every time; yes, floppy disks were rare back then)

Even QBasic in MS-DOS, and having a HDD, was such a huge improvement compare to that... 😂

I was on the edge of that stuff... saw it, saw others use it, but always had an alternative thankfully. I watched a guy in college using a dumb terminal into the college systems coding in VI .. that thing was too frustrating to me. All I know now is if I accidentally fire it up, I can quit with :q! all the rest is a dim memory. And I remember trying to use edlin on some older systems that lacked edit or anything else, it was frustrating -- reminds me of those 1 line at a time typewriters.

jonnin wrote:
I watched a guy in college using a dumb terminal into the college systems coding in VI .. that thing was too frustrating to me.

I know a guy who still does all his Oracle stuff with VI !!

I occasionally still use it myself, just for shits and giggles. I imagine one could get used to it for production coding, but it is a long long way from the fanciness and capability found in VS.

I use vi/vim as a text editor all the time when I'm on a Unix/Linux box and don't have a graphical desktop to work with, e.g. if I'm ssh'ing into the box.

Hell, I sometimes use it in GitBash on Windows; if I'm already using a Bash console, and I need to quickly edit a file, it's much quicker and easier than grabbing the mouse, navigating to the file in Explorer, right-clicking on it and selecting "Open in Notepad++".

I do know people, even in 2023, who use it normally for software development, with enough extensions that it's basically a full-featured IDE. It not to my taste, but it certainly seems powerful enough if you're already familiar with it, and they're as productive with it as people using other IDE's.

What I definitely don't miss is all the messing about with tiny/compact/small/medium/large/huge memory models and 64KB segments.

for notepad ++ I have this in a batch file so I can say npp filename:
call "D:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" %1

VI never lacked for features, its just a great deal of memorization to get it to do all the basic stuff. I don't hate it, I just never used it enough to get good at it.