alt Hacker NewsIn the history of Unix its also a common way to propose tool replacements, for instance how `less` became `more` on most systems, or `vim` became the new `vi` which in its day became the new `ed`.
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nailer • last Friday at 2:31 PM
> instance how `less` became `more` on most systems
How `more` became `less`.
The name of 'more' was from paging - rather than having text scroll off the screen, it would show you one page, then ask if you wanted to see 'more' and scroll down.
'less' is a joke by the less authors. 'less is more' etc.
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Yes and no. We don't really have the equivalent of comp.sources.unix nowadays, which is where the early versions of those occurred, and comp.sources.unix did not take just anything. Rich Salz had rules.
Plus, since I actually took stevie and screen and others from comp.sources.unix and worked on them, and wasn't able to even send my improvements to M. Salz or the original authors at all, from my country, I can attest that contributing improvements had hurdles just as large to overcome back then as there exist now. They're just different.