alt Hacker NewsThe Traditional Vi
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I learned vi back in the day and have never really graduated to vim.
My favorite features are the ranges on the commands (like substitute or delete), piping the buffer into the bottomless utility of the classic UNIX command line, and the . do again command.
About the only vim feature I use today is being able to navigate while entering text, but even after all this time, that is not automatic to me.
I have used syntax coloring a couple of times, I find it particularly useful for XML, especially XML with chunks of XML commented out.
As an undergrad around 1984 I stumbled on some AT&T 3B2's in the computer lab and started to play. Knowing nothing of Unix (would have been ~ SVR3.x), I asked for help and the TA said something like "read the fine manual" as was customary. So I started off with "man something" and off we went, ending up at "man 1 vi", the glorious, pure original, none of this vim stuff...
Of course when I got onto the BSD VAX, someone set me straight and it was Emacs from there on..
Tangentially related, I wish more websites and blogs looked like this now. It's elegant and modern but simple.
A 2007 article from sourceforge.net and it's not even throwback Thursday.
"Gunnar Ritter <[email protected]> 2007-11-29"
I wish elvis was still around. I don't want everything vim has but I like syntax highlighting and other conveniences
vim with mouse frustrates the hell out of me.
Just give me basic vi, or a complete editor
Github mirror + some bugfixes
:x is a vim feature, so this wouldn't support it, so you'll have to use :wq instead.
text editors 5ever
I was just talking about a fun and largely forgotten feature of Joy+Horton vi elsewhere.
* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116793159030149624
You can see it here in Ritter vi on lines 83 et seq. of ex_vis.h . vi actually has three flavours of its 'open' mode, for cursor addressable video terminals, non-cursor addressable video terminals, and actual paper terminals.
There's an as-yet unfilled niche for the retrocomputeristas with genuine ADM-3s or (as someone pointed out) TI Silent 703s and suchlike to do a YouTube video showing Joy+Horton vi in its 3 open modes.