The History of Editors (Somewhat)

TLDR: I created an interactive chart of editors, see it in action.

Today the news dropped that Jetbrains is cancelling its “new” editor, Fleet. Not that I use the product, but it got me thinking about editors (again). I love editors , specifically ones that I can change and bend to my will, such as Emacs.

In my career I have used many different editors. I started on a Laser VTech 310 in Basic 2.0 and from there I transitioned into the world of Pascal and C/C++ to end up on the JVM with Java and Clojure . During that time I have seen many editors come and go in the work field.

Reminiscing about the editors that I have seen made me think about creating a sort of family tree of editors, starting from where I started and then adding editors from the different domain in which I have been active. It kinda got out of hand, just check out this picture:

I started with my trusty Emacs and its friend (neo)vi(m). Alongside staples such as IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code. Using some LLM magic and Wikipedia knowledge I started assembling lineage of the various products and influence of different editors on eachother. For instance, did you know that Lighttable introduced some of the web based editing concepts we now see in Electron? Or that Visual Age was rebuilt into Eclipse, from which modern day editors take a lot of lessons?

I added several neat features to the graph. First you can hover on nodes and vertexes to show you some more information on the editor or its connection.

Each node can also be clicked, this will lock the popup and will allow you to click the link(s) in the popup. I want to collect some personal stories for different editors, or perhaps link to some form of codified history on the particular editor.

You might also wonder about the big blobs on the graph. While researching I found several names to pop up in a lot of different editors, Anders, Erich, Molenaar and the good people of Jetbrains, so I mapped out their influence in the editor landscape. I found the influence that Anders Hejlsberg has had extremely interesting, it basically traces from the start of the code editor (Turbo Pascal, Delphi) all the way to VS Code (Typescript).

If you have any corrections or editor/concepts/stories to add, drop me a line on Mastodon.