Almost gave up on Unix

[PDP-8]

I nearly gave up in disgust on Unix when I first started way back when I first tried to learn the vi editor.

I forgot if it was Slackware, Yggdrasil, or MWC Coherent, but when I first fired it up I saw all those ~ tilde's on the left side of the screen, and thought that was stupid or poorly programmed.

I didn't know what those tilde's were for, none of my reference materials showed them, and wondered if the rest of unix was going to be so poorly programmed.   Seriously - but I was young and impatient.

All the study materials didn't show the tilde's, and nothing on early bbs' or Compuserve made mention of them either.

I actually walked away from unix for a few years because of that knee-jerk reaction to the tildes in vi.

A few years later - a new 386 box, and thought I'd try a "professional" version of Xenix.  $600 for only 2 seats and nearly everything interesting unbundled as extra-cost extras ...

So I fire up the vi editor ready to get down to learning it on a professional system and the freakin' tildes were still there!  AGGHH

Then I found out they were supposed to be there.  Oh boy.  Heh, love vi to this day, but learned a little bit about not being prone to knee-jerk reactions when it comes to unix.

[Santos]

So what are the tildes for? 

[Rich]

Hi Santos
The lines with the tildes indicate you have gone paste the end of the file. The busybox  less  command does the
same thing. If you have a terminal 25 lines high and open a file 10 lines long you will see about 14 lines of tildes.

[Santos]

Hello Rich.

Thank you very much for the information, I did see them and thought it could be something related to the EOF.

Thank you again!

Besides, compared to raw   ed   . vi is much much user friendly.

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