editors/em 1.0.0 NetBSD

em - the editor for mortals - is a variant of the standard Unix text editor - ed. It includes all of ed, so the documentation for ed is fully applicable to em. Em also has a number of new commands and facilities designed to improve its interaction and increase its usefulness.

Em differs from ed in that it normally prefixes command lines with a '>'. For those who prefer silence, if the editor is invoked by any name not having 'm' as its second character, no prompts will appear. Other ways of controlling prompts are described below.

The em editor was designed for display terminals and was a single-line-at-a-time visual editor. It was one of the first programs on Unix to make heavy use of "raw terminal input mode", in which the running program, rather than the terminal device driver, handled all keystrokes.

Inspired by em, and by their own tweaks to ed, Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, both graduate students at UC Berkeley, took code from em to make en, and then "extended" en to create ex version 0.1.

This version was translated from V6 Unix C (mid-70s era) to the present day by Pierre Gaston.