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Comment by nsajko | Hacker News Reader

vi is not Vim.

Actually it is.

Not only in the sense that Vim is a clone of vi (with added stuff), but more specifically in that in lots of distros the vi command is just vim (with some special flags).

Old BSD vi today is, and has been for over a decade or so, dead.

It's not dead, it's finished. It's got all the features of the original vi, therefore mission accomplished. Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.

>Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.

Actually it does, as architectures, APIs, etc change, and if the software doesn't catch up, it can get impossible to run it, or it will need BC compatibility layers, to run 5-10-15 years down the line.

Not to mention big changes in how we use the software, e.g. the need to handle utf-8, which didn't exist in Bill Joy's time.

>It's not dead, it's finished. It's got all the features of the original vi, therefore mission accomplished.

Huh? "got all the features of the original vi"? We ARE talking about the original vi.

I thought we were talking about nvi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi

Afaik, nvi actually doesn't have all the features of the original vi. According to Wikipedia, "The aspects of nvi that are still marked preliminary or unimplemented are, for the time being, likely to remain that way." Moreover, nvi had been developed for a little while after the various BSDs stopped syncing with upstream due to licensing issues after version 1.79. I honestly think the reason no one develops it anymore is because no one cares. It's good enough for use in emergencies, and beyond that, it's either good enough for the people who use it, or they just use a more featureful editor.

> Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.

I have to politely but firmly disagree. Software rots if it's not being actively maintained.

Underlying API/ABI's get deprecated and eventually dropped, dependencies reach end-of-life and need to be replaced, and so on.

Take one program today and try to run it in 10 years, as is. I bet it won't work.

I'm talking of course, of any non-trivial piece of code. "Fizzbuzz" written in an interpreted language... it might even run if you're lucky.

(Edit: formatting)

Underlying API/ABI's get deprecated and eventually dropped, dependencies reach end-of-life and need to be replaced, and so on.

But BSD vim (nvi) is maintained as part of the base systems of the BSDs, so it changes with system changes although it's in maintenance mode. E.g.:

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/vi/

So yeah, it's being maintained. That's why it doesn't rot.

Hey, if you want text in italics use asterixs.

     > *Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.*

becomes

> Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.

Fixed it, thanks.

vi works fine on my BSD machine.

You could say that Vim is an (implementation of) vi, but vi is not Vim.

(Not that this is an important issue.)

Edit: also, vi is not dead: www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/vi

>You could say that Vim is an (implementation of) vi, but vi is not Vim

No, it's a derivative project. However, in lots of distros, when one runs "vi" they are actually running "vim" (in vi standards mode).

Vim stands for vi improved and started on the Amega in 1991 so almost 25 years old. Certain people still use vi which was an improvement over ed August 1969 (Though I have been known to use ed in scripts from time to time).

Nonetheless he is right. As far as I remember Vim is based on the code of an editor that was similar to vi, and not vi itself.

Vi is a standard not a specific implementation. There was an original Vi, but since it's a standard unix tool, it got cloned by everyone who ever made a unix clone after it was added to BSD.

Vim can be invoked to conform to the vi standard, although usually it only gets used that way when a vim user is on an unfamiliar machine.

Interesting view. I've never seen vi as a standard. But it makes sense.

Technically something can't call itself Unix(tm) without vi(1) [0][1]

[0] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/vi.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

Well I made his short two word answer into an explanation.

I believe it was Stevie (a vi clone for the Atari ST).

If you ever wind up booting the OpenBSD ramdisk kernel (typically used for installation and system rescue), the only editor available is ed. Luckily, if you're reasonably comfortable with vi, you'll find that most of the 'colon commands' work, and the other commands are pretty familiar ('i' for insert, 'a' for append, etc.). If you're an OpenBSD power user, it behooves you to have a hardcopy of the ed manpage handy ;)

The OpenBSD ramdisk doesn't provide busybox vi?

But ed is the standard Unix text editor.

Nope. The OpenBSD ramdisk doesn't provide busybox anything. I just double-checked on 5.8. I also doubt that they'd ever switch to using busybox given their aversion to the GPL. They also have their own tool (crunchgen) that packs a bunch of binaries into a single "Swiss army knife" executable.

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