vi

/VI/ , not , /vi:/ , never , /siks/ , n. [from Visual Interface ] A screen
editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de
facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside
of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new
users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text
nor vice versa, and the default setup on older versions provides no
indication of which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent
reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/ ; there
is now a vi clone named vile ). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim
and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet
poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor
and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the
bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.

