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