Why vi? (was Re: [NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way)

Walter Hansen gandalf at sonic.net
Fri Oct 28 17:09:04 PDT 2005


It's kinda like: it's familiar, not bad enough for a major uprising, so it
won't change. It's a little like our government.

Of course now I zoom arround in vi easily. For some reason it reminds me
of the old DOS wordperfect.


>
> On Fri, October 28, 2005 11:54, Walter Hansen wrote:
>
>> I think vi was probably the first really usable text editor on
>> *ix systems and everyone collectively heaved a sigh of relief
>> and said "I guess that will do" and nobody has had enough
>> motivation to replace it with something better.
>
> Note that there is no single agency *TO* "replace it with
> something better."
>
> Linus could _probably_ force another editor to become the default on
> *Linux* systems... but not on other Freenix'es (e.g. the BSD's), nor
> the commercial flavors like Solaris, HP-UX, MacOSX, &c.  <thinks of
> "vi" becoming "default" under Mac OS, and giggles helplessly...
> some things are just THAT absurd...>
>
> It's the *one* editor that you can reliably find on any flavor of
> *NIX, no matter how new or old, free or commercial, etc etc etc.
>
> Also note that "vi" falls into an entire *family* of editors, that
> include programmers' tools like "sed"... with commands that transfer
> from editor to editor; so, UNIX shell-programmers (i.e. many if not
> most SysAdmin types) *like* to have this familiarity when they move
> from programming to text-editing and back.
>
> So, even if there were a single agent who *could* make the change,
> it's hard to see enough impetus from the SysAdmin community *TO* make
> the change.
>
>
> - Steve S.
>
>
>
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