Tuesday, May 15, 2001

I had the oddest experience last night.

I’ve been wishing for a copy of vi (the text editor) for AtheOS for awhile now. I couldn’t stand it any longer last night, so I went to vim.org, downloaded the latest Unix source package, transferred it to my AtheOS machine (Lady), and tried to compile it. To my shock, it compiled and ran fine.

I’d just ported vi to AtheOS.

I’ve never ported anything before. I’ve always regarded application porting as a byzantine act best left to highly-skilled coders, like kernel hacking or writing video drivers. It was really weird to think that I’d just ported a popular app to AtheOS; it’s like one day deciding to solder together an Ethernet card, and watching it work flawlessly. It helped that I didn’t have to change anything in the vim source, of course.

So, I put it up on a little webpage, added an entry on Kamidake, and announced it to the AtheOS community. Maybe it’s already been ported, but this is such a good feeling.