The Vi Editor

authors:

~ant


table of contents

Tilde.Club has The Traditional Vi installed on its premises. It is not just another Vi clone, but the direct continuation of Bill Joy’s legendary work at Berkeley. The binaries are in /usr/archaic/bin/ and the man pages (separately for ex and vi) in /usr/archaic/share/man/man/.

You can invoke The Traditional Vi in several ways (in the order of increased engagement):

  1. by the full path to the executable:

    /usr/archaic/bin/vi

  2. by adding it as an alias to your shell’s rc file (~/.bashrc for Bash), e.g:

    alias tvi=/usr/archaic/bin/vi

    and then invokng Vi by typing tvi,

  3. by adding the locations Vi and its documentation in front of the PATH and MANPATH environment variables in your shell’s profile script (for Bash, ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile):

    export    PATH="/usr/archaic/bin/:$PATH"
export MANPATH="/usr/archaic/share/man/man:$MANPATH"

The latter method has the advantage of affecting subshells, so that if you specify vi as the default editor in your e-mail or news client, or another CLI program, it will invoke The Traditional Vi, ditto for your shell scripts and the EDITOR environment variale.

Resources §

  1. Bill Joy’s An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi,
  2. vi(1) man page,
  3. ex(1) man page,
  4. A concise vi reference,
  5. The Ultimate guide to the VI and EX text editors (a paper book),
  6. The #vi channel on the Libera.Chat IRC network, dedicated to the original Vi and all its variants except Vim & co,
  7. VI experience in the shell.

Building §

The Traditional Vi is surprisingly easy to build from its source. You only need to locate the following line in Makefile:

TERMLIB = termlib

and replace the value with curses or ncurses, depending on your preferred terminal library. Now you can build and install the project with:

make && make install