Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2020 17:40:10 -0800
From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
        <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] screen editors
Message-ID: <D192F5A5-2A67-413C-8F5C-FCF195151E4F@bitblocks.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=utf-8

On Jan 8, 2020, at 5:28 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 05:08:59PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 8, 2020, 4:22 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 8 Jan 2020, Chet Ramey wrote:
>>>
>>>>> That's a real big vi in RHL.
>>>>
>>>> It's vim.
>>>
>>> It's also VIM on the Mac.
>>>
>>
>> Nvi is also interesting and 1/10th the size of vim. It's also the FreeBSD
>> default for vi.
>
> I was gonna stay out of this thread (it has the feel of old folks somehow)
> but 2 comments:
>
> Keith did nvi (I can't remember why?  licensing or something) and he did
> a pretty faithful bug for bug compatible job.  I've always wondered why.
> I like Keith but it seemed like a waste.  There were other people taking
> vi forward, elvis, xvi (I hacked the crap out of that one, made it mmap
> the file and had a whole string library that treated \n like NULL) and
> I think vim was coming along.  So doing a compat vi felt like a step
> backward for me.
>
> For all the vim haters, come on.  Vim is awesome, it gave me the one
> thing that I wanted from emacs, multiple windows.  I use that all the
> time.  It's got piles of stuff that I don't use, probably should, but
> it is every bit as good of a vi as the original and then it added more.
> I'm super grateful that vim came along.

The first thing I do on a new machine is to install nvi. Very grateful to
Keith Bostic for implementing it. I do use multiple windows — only
horizontal splits but that is good enough for me as all my terminal
windows are 80 chars wide. Not a vim hater but never saw the need.