Well, I really dove into using vi by way of nvi this past week and I have to say... the water's fine. It turns out that vi is a much simpler editor to understand and use (but no less powerful) than it's great grandchild, vim. To be fair, vim is an interesting editor and having used it off and on since the mid '90s, it's very familiar... but its powers? difficult to attain. vim stands as an excellent example of just how far you can take a product that works, keeping its core, but expanding it in all directions. No matter how much I tried to grasp its essence, it alluded me. The online help files seemed inscrutable to me, mixing environment settings, ex commands, ex mode commands, vi motions, insert mode commands in ways that seemed quite confusing to me. I know that I'm probably among a select few vim users that love it without really having a clue as to how it works. My best resource has been the web and search, but of late I've been wanting more. That's what drove me on this quest to really dig in to how things used to work and nvi is the best surrogate of the old ways that I could find (well, excluding heirloom vi, the traditional vi, which I've confirmed works pretty much the same way as nvi, with lisp support and without a few nice-to-haves nvi has). Anyway, here's something I worked out, after much travail - vi appears to be all about modes, movement, counts, operators, registers, and screens (which I found very weird at first, but simple in retrospect)... with these fundamentals down, it seems like you can do anything and I mean anything... and all of the other functions are just bolted on for the purpose of making their specific tasks work. Getting this out of the existing documentation was a mess. Thankfully the nvi docs (based on the 4.4 docs) are much slimmer and better organized. Even so, they make assumptions of the reader that I don't seem to fit. Take motions as prolly the most glaring example - all of the docs I've ever seen organize these by logical units of text (words, paras, etc), personally and apparently persistently, I think of motion as directed, so it took me a lot of experimentation, head scratching, and writing things out several times in several different ways to realize I could represent the idea on a single notecard as (some commands appear in multiple lines): Leftward motions - [[, {, (, 0, ^|_, B, b, h|^H Rightward Movement - l|SP, e, E, w, W, $, ), }, ]] Upward motions - 1G, ^B, H, ^U, -, k | ^P Downward motions - G, ^F, L, ^D, ^M | +, j | ^J | ^N Absolute - | G Relative - %, H, M, L Marks - m, ', `, '', `` Keeping in mind that movements left-to-right are - section, para, sentence, line, text, word and endword (big, and small), and letter. And up and down are - file, screen, in screen (HML), half-screen, chars-in-line, and line. For me, this inversion from units of motion to direction of motion put forty some-odd commands in much closer reach for me. Looking back at the vim documentation, I see how its sheer volume and the way it is organized got in the way of my seeing the forest. Thankfully, in nvi, there are two incredibly useful ex commands to help - exu[sage] and viu[sage]. I simply printed these out and worked with them making the experimental assumption that they would serve as a baseline that represented the full capabilities of vi... and sure enough, after working and working with them, I am pretty confident they are sufficient for any editing task. Wow, who knew? I loved vi, but now, I'm starting to really appreciate it's simplicity?! I can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth. I never thought of it as simple... those movement commands were far too numerous as I understood them. Are there things I miss from vim? Sure, I miss command line completion in ex mode, I want my help text to appear in a window where I can search, I would like better window control. But, I think I'll stick with nvi a while until I really nail it down. Then all of the cool stuff that vim offers, or neovim, will seem like icing on the cake that is vi. Thanks to Ken Thompson for writing a work of art that serves as the true core of this editor, to Bill Joy for his great work in extending it, again to Bill Joy for bringing vi to life, and to Mary Ann for the macros and making it accessible to the rest of us, and others who contributed. It's 2024 and I still can't find a better terminal editor than vi... as it existed in the late '80s or as it exists today as nvi/vim/neovim. Amazing piece of software. Off to figure out tags!! Arg, seems like it oughtta be really useful in my work with source code, why can't I figure it out?! Sheesh. Will

vim stands as an excellent example of just how far you can take a product that works, keeping its core, but expanding it in all directions.

Off to figure out tags!! Arg, seems like it oughtta be really useful in my work with source code, why can't I figure it out?! Sheesh.