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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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).

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