The Traditional Vi

(ex-vi.sourceforge.net)

46 points | by exvi 6 hours ago

9 comments

  • JdeBP 2 hours ago
    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.

  • imglorp 1 hour ago
    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..

  • GaryBluto 4 hours ago
    Tangentially related, I wish more websites and blogs looked like this now. It's elegant and modern but simple.
    • voidUpdate 1 hour ago
      I wish it took up more than 640 pixels on the left of my 1920 pixel screen. I changed the CSS of the body to be 900pt instead of 480, and it renders at 1200px wide, which looks a lot nicer to my eyes. Didn't bother trying to center it though, which would have improved it even more
    • himata4113 4 hours ago
      Lacks centering, other than that I also found it enjoyable to look at.
      • deadbabe 1 hour ago
        That’s a feature. It lets your thumb scroll comfortably in a larger blank area so the content is always in view for you. There is no reason for things to be centered, it does not aid readability.
        • himata4113 58 minutes ago
          Not a feature on a 32inch ultrawide.
          • deadbabe 57 minutes ago
            Use smaller window
    • christophilus 4 hours ago
      To me, the justified text makes it an effortful read.
      • Gualdrapo 3 hours ago
        Yup, I hope every one agrees to leave proper justified text to LaTeX/ConTeXt/Typst/<your_favorite_typesetting_software>, doing such thing for HTML is still ugly and makes things harder to read
    • nosioptar 2 hours ago
      Breaks Firefox's reader mode.

      Looks like dog shit on mobile.

      I agree that this general style is good, just without some of this page's fuckups.

      • kps 2 hours ago
        Chrome's too, but why? It's just plain HTML.
        • heftig 2 hours ago
          Mobile browsers are assuming you're looking at a legacy page optimized for desktops (widescreen) and have a relatively large virtual screen size by default. They expect you to manually zoom in as necessary. Adding this helps:

            <meta name="viewport" content="width=640, initial-scale=1">
          
          This matches the max-width specified by the CSS. However, a smaller viewport width might be appropriate to increase the text size on mobile.
        • chorizo 2 hours ago
          Safari reader mode on mobile works great. But then again, this is a site where you should not need it.
  • mghackerlady 2 hours ago
    I wish elvis was still around. I don't want everything vim has but I like syntax highlighting and other conveniences
  • senthil_rajasek 3 hours ago
    A 2007 article from sourceforge.net and it's not even throwback Thursday.

    "Gunnar Ritter <gunnarr@acm.org> 2007-11-29"

    • herodoturtle 2 hours ago
      It's been years since I heard the term "Throwback Thursday", funny that reading it here felt like a throwback in its own right ^_^
      • wyclif 19 minutes ago
        It's still very much alive.
  • jbverschoor 2 hours ago
    vim with mouse frustrates the hell out of me.

    Just give me basic vi, or a complete editor

    • setopt 2 hours ago
      `set compatible`?
  • haunter 3 hours ago
    Github mirror + some bugfixes

    https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/

  • fragmede 3 hours ago
    :x is a vim feature, so this wouldn't support it, so you'll have to use :wq instead.
    • JdeBP 2 hours ago
      Incorrect.

      :x is a vi feature, that was introduced by Mary Ann Horton to actual Joy+Horton vi in February 1980.

      * https://code.illumos.org/plugins/gitiles/illumos-gate/+/refs...

      Ritter's vi is derived from Joy+Horton vi. Illumos has the original.

    • atsaloli 3 hours ago
      or ZZ to save and exit
      • alkyon 1 hour ago
        Repeat ZZ to save & exit if there are more files to edit

        ZQ - discard & exit

      • herodoturtle 2 hours ago
        28 years of vi and TIL about ZZ.

        Thanks friend! ^_^

        • bbaron63 1 hour ago
          ZZ is the first vi command I learned. After typing vi and only seeing a column of ~s, I asked how do I get out of this thing. Someone answered - ZZ.
          • wyclif 49 minutes ago
            Did they say "zz" or specify [capital] "ZZ"?
        • mghackerlady 2 hours ago
          I just learnt it the other day, as well. Granted, it was from chapter 1 of "Learning the vi and vim Text Editors" but shhh
  • mikejulietbravo 1 hour ago
    text editors 5ever