9 Oldest Text Editors you probably have never heard of

If you still think that Microsoft Notepad or EMacs were the first Text Editors ever known to the mankind then you are so incorrect. There had been Text Editors even before them, some were Free and others were either licensed under some License or were proprietary.

History of Text Editors starts from early 70’s era. With very basic functionality, those editors didn’t have many features to format your text. Time has really changed now. Editors like XEmacs and Notepad++ are one of the favorite text editors due to their exhaustive features, customizations and support for extensibility.

Okay, let’s not dig deep in to the history. Below are the list of 9 oldest Text Editors (sans Emacs and Notepad) and brief history about them.

Ed

Ed is one of the oldest and standard Text editors of UNIX operating system. Ed is the first Text Editor to have implementation of regular expressions. Without any visual feedback, its error messages were in the form of a question mark (”?”).
With coming of so many advance editors, nobody uses Ed these days but sometimes it is very useful when there is no support available for any other Text Editors or you are writing some simple shell script.

JOE

JOE is an acronym for Joe’s Own Editor. It is a terminal based text editor for UNIX. It was the first text editor which incorporated built in help system which had a reminder on the screen of how to use it.
In many Linux distributions of that era, JOE was the default editor which is the reason why it was so popular then. The editor is still available with advanced features. You can download it from its sourceforge project page.

SlickEdit

SlickEdit was the first advanced editor that supported features like syntax highlighting, refactoring code and keyboard shortcuts customizations. It is a cross-browser platform which is still available with much more advanced features. Latest version of SlickEdit was released in March 2009. You can download it from their website.

CRiSP Editor

CRiSP is yet another cross platform text editor popular among programmers. Early features of CRiSP also had syntax highlighting, keyboard bindings and code navigation and refactoring features.
CRiSP can also handle huge multi-gigabytes of files. The editor is still very much available for download with improvements. You can download it from their website.

Epsilon

Epsilon was the popular text editor among programmers. It was a shadow of Emacs with its default key bindings and layout too. Epsilon is supported on MSDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS/2 and has support for Unicode too.
Epsilon is not free. It can be bought from its website.

VEDIT

VEDIT is a text editor for MS Windows and MS DOS. It was one of the first Visual Text editor which could also handle files of huge size. Since it is written in Assembly Language VEDIT is extremely fast Text editor when compared to other editors.
It also supported editing of remote files via FTP and was able to detect DOS, Unix and Mac files before editing them.
VEDIT is also commercial software and you can buy it from its website.

Sam Editor

Sam was the first editor that supported multiple files editing. Initially it was designed for UNIX terminals and was later ported to other systems too. Sam is the favorite text editor of many distinguished people like Bjarne Stroustrup, Brian Kernigham and Ken Thompson (Ed editor)
Sam Editor is also available for Windows. You can download Sam directly from Bell Labs’ website’s software
directory.

NEdit

NEdit stands for Nirvana Editor. It was another popular visual text editors as well as source code editor used by programmers. Its interface quite resembles to Mac and Windows editors. It was one of the first editor that supported automatic indentation on the basis of code language that you are editing.
You can download the recent version of NEdit from their website

mined

Mined stands for MINIX-Editor. Min-ed is a terminal based editor that is available for Unix, Linux, Windows and MSDOS. It was one of the first text editors to support Unicode inside a terminal. It also had implementation of smart quotes and had extensive support for Unicode.
You can download mined from its sourceforge project page.

This is a guest post from Himanshu, who writes about Tech Tips and Internet on WHibb.com