1960s: Line Editors & Early Terminals Link to heading

  • TECO (1962) – Developed at MIT for PDP-1, an early programmable editor.
  • QED (1965) – Influenced later Unix editors like ed and vi.
  • RUNOFF (1964) – One of the first text-formatting programs, precursor to markup languages.
  • EDITS & Quick Editor – Used on IBM mainframes and similar systems.

1970s: Unix & Screen-Based Editors Emerge Link to heading

  • ed (1971) – Created by Ken Thompson for Unix; a line editor.
  • vi (1976, public 1978) – Bill Joy’s vi (from ex) revolutionized screen-based editing.
  • Emacs (1976) – Originally written in TECO macros, later rewritten in Lisp.
  • XEDIT (1970s) – IBM’s full-screen editor for mainframes.

1980s: Personal Computers & GUI-Based Editors Link to heading

  • GNU Emacs (1984) – Richard Stallman rewrote Emacs in Lisp, making it extensible.1
  • vi clones (e.g., Vim, 1988) – Clones of vi started appearing.
  • WordStar (1978, popular in 1980s) – Early word processor for CP/M and DOS.
  • Brief (1985) – Popular among DOS developers.
  • QEdit (1985) & Turbo Pascal Editor – Lightweight DOS text editors.

1990s: GUI Editors & IDEs Link to heading

  • Vim (1991) – An extended vi clone with modern features.
  • Microsoft Notepad (1992) – Bundled with Windows.
  • BBEdit (1992) – Popular for Mac users.1
  • TextPad (1992) – Lightweight editor for Windows.
  • UltraEdit (1994) – Powerful editor for Windows.
  • IDE Editors (Borland, Visual Studio, CodeWarrior) – Code editors inside IDEs became standard.

2000s: Open-Source & Advanced Text Editors Link to heading

  • Sublime Text (2008) – Introduced fast UI and powerful features.1
  • Notepad++ (2003) – Open-source alternative to Notepad, very popular for Windows.
  • Kate (2001) – KDE’s powerful editor.
  • SciTE (1999–2000s) – Lightweight but extensible.

2010s: Electron-Based & Cloud Editing Link to heading

  • Visual Studio Code (2015) – Quickly became dominant, integrating IDE-like features.1
  • Atom (2014) – GitHub’s extensible editor, later discontinued (2022).1
  • Brackets (2014) – Web-focused, but faded out.
  • Sublime Text & Vim/Emacs – Still widely used.

2020s: Performance-Focused & Multiplayer Editing Link to heading

  • Zed (2023) – Built by former Atom devs, focusing on speed and collaboration.1
  • Helix (2021) – A modal editor inspired by Vim and Kakoune.
  • Neovim (2015, gaining steam in 2020s) – Modernized Vim.
  • JetBrains Fleet (2021) – New lightweight JetBrains editor.
  • VS Code – Remains dominant, especially with its GitHub Copilot integration.

  1. My primary in each era ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎