This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
I am wondering if Unicode support should not be added into the main article. I believe people would be interested if vi can support Unicode or not. I am not a vi user, so I have no way to check this myself. -- Saoshyant 15:11, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to try to put a date on vi's creation. The commonly-quoted date is 1976.
In this interview, Bill Joy says "it was probably '76". He apparently started it in 1975, but lost the ex source code in 1976. He started the screen editor late in '76, while listening to election results on the radio.
O'Reilly contradicts slightly, saying the ex Pascal source code was published with BSD early in 1977. That is consistent with ex/vi being written in late 1976. But I have not found any information about when the name vi came into use. -- Nate Silva 01:01, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable with capitalizing it as "Vi" at the beginning of a sentence? Or is there a Wikipedia policy about mangling case-sensitive stuff? -- Kimiko 13:12, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
vi looks weird when the monospace font doesn't look at all like the variable width font used for the rest of the text (most mono fonts don't look so good in between varwidth text). Leaving it as vi everywhere looks best imho. -- Kimiko 13:44, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Is the screenshot in this article "vi" or "nvi"? I don't think the original "vi" shows the status line at the bottom of the screen (Solaris (:version = Version SVR4.0, Solaris 2.5.0) and HP-UX (:version = HP Version $ B.11.23 Jul 15 2003 02:09:47 $) do not), whereas "nvi" (:version = Version 1.79 (10/23/96) The CSRG, University of California, Berkeley.) does. — Lady Lysine Ikinsile 09:01, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)
Except, vi is not actually modal, or at least, that's how it was explained to me. "Don't think of vi as being modal!". It's actually a stateful filter :-). It's a very very fine distinction, but vi is based on ex, and you can actually still use it as a Filter_program! Kim Bruning 09:35, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Ah well, you left your funny-bone at home today you say? Very well, heres a slightly more serious answer.
In vi, you can do things like:
20iI am not naughty^M^[
(where ^M is return, and ^[ is escape)
I think my school teachers knew about this before I did, because for some reason they always insisted that I use handwriting for this kind of thing.
The above works because it is interpreted as a single command by vi, and not as a sequence of mode switches like some folks might expect.
I hope that gives you a bit of an idea at least, I'm a bit too sleepy to go figuring out something more decent. I hope this gives you a first inkling. If it doesn't, please forgive me, and maybe I'll type something more enlightening tomorrow. :)
Have a nice evening! Kim Bruning 20:33, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
There's 2 answers to this. I'll just do one for now:
what does :
20ifoobar^[
do?
Try it. There's something a bit wrong there wrt assuming vi is a modal editor :-) I'm terribly sorry about not giving this my all, but for some reason I keep being either tired or have a headache when logging on to wikipedia recently. Kim Bruning 17:44, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Okay, well I'm really spending way too much time on this, but here goes.
Consider these 3 lines:
#1 echo -e '$_="just another crazy hacker\\n";\ns/crazy/perl/;\nprint;\n '| perl #2 echo -e 'a\njust another perl hacker\n.\ns/perl/ex/\nw! testme'| ex && cat testme
#3 echo -e 'ajust another perl hacker\E:s/perl/vi\n:w! testme\n:q!'| vi && cat testme
They all have similar input, and equivalent output. The thing is, there's probably not many folks who would say the top 2 lines are some form of modal input.
Based on what I think is being said here, you might claim that line 3 *is* modal in some way.
Okay, that's interesting.
So did I predict right, and will you be calling the 3rd line modal? If so, why? I'm interested in hearing your arguments. :-)
Quickly answering your question "why does modal not apply to vi", well, the answer to that was right at the start of this debate: vi is actually a stateful filter.
See if you can look at it this way: vi is a special mode of ex, which takes input in a specific way, and parses it as a special case of ex commands.
Kim Bruning 08:49, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
From the source code point of view. I have been working on 2 of the major vi clones, elvis and nvi, and they do not have anything that is called "mode", as in "insert mode" or "append mode". "i" and "a" are commands, not modes. As someone said in the above, "i" or "a" can be repeated by numbers (10ia<ESC> inserts 10 "a"s). I will have to check the real vi (now ex-vi) but i believe it goes the same,
Jun-ihiro itojun Hagino 12:42, 9 Sep 2007 (UTC)
Although I'm not a vi user (I'm a BBEdit guy), I'm wondering if there are plans to promote this article as a feature article, considering that Emacs recently got its 5 minutes of fame. Surely we can tap into the rivalry in a good way, as opposed to the typical flame war. :-)
Moved from main page:
But it fairly frequently is pronounced /vi/. Shouldn't Wikipedia be descriptive rather than prescriptive?
I take it it's meant to be pronounced "V. I", like the two letters. We need to fix this:
as the two things don't agree. See SAMPA. "V.I." is [vi: aI]. The often-used but incorrect pronunciation is (I'm guessing) like the word "vye" as in "vye for his affections": [vaI]. COuls someone with knowledge of phonetics AND this program check? -- Tarquin
I'm generally in favor of descriptive-rather-than-prescriptive, but as a 20-year Unix veteran, I will verify that indeed, anyone who says "vye" or "six" will be instantly tagged as a clueless newbie. It's "vee eye". In fact, it's "vee eye" even when it's "vim" :-) I'm not that familiar with SAMPA, but I'll look it up and try to fix that. -- LDC
If it's "V. I" like the two letters it's [vi: aI]. I'll fix that on the subject page. -- Tarquin
The "vai" pronunciation appears to be standard usage at Sun Education in Melbourne, Australia. So I changed the entry to say 'generally' not pronounced that way. In any case, it's evident there's enough controversy around it to mention it - David Gerard 16:06, Jan 9, 2004 (UTC)
I've converted the SAMPA to IPA (without prejudice to the debate as to hte question how it should be pronounced - by the way from my UNIX days I always remember it being called "vye" as a single word - and removed the convertIPA template. rossb 14:22, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
For goodness sakes - it appears to be pronounced in one of two ways, can't we just accept that, get over it and have the article show the two options (thereby avoiding this whole silly schoolboy argument on the front page)? For the record, I call it vi. And always will do. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 147.114.226.173 ( talk • contribs) .
I have cited the pronunciation to a reliable source in a footnote. While I am sure that some people pronounce it differently, Wikipedia sourcing policy would require that the alternate pronunciation be cited to a reliable source as well, and I have yet to see one cited. Plenty of people pronounce "nuclear" as "nucular", but we don't put than in a Wikipedia article either. Anecdotal assertions like "The 'vai' pronunciation appears to be standard usage at Sun Education in Melbourne, Australia" are not encyclopedic. Wikipedia is not a dictionary of regional or subcultural English, so we don't need to record various people's random mispronunciations of things. So, if you find a reliable source that gives an alternate pronunciation, feel free to add it. Otherwise, it no more belongs in the article than "nucular" does. -- MCB 22:36, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Haeleth, be assured I had no idea you were among those who used what you would like to be considered a legitimate alternative pronunciation, and I certainly intended no personal attack; I assumed you were defending an abstract point. That said, this discussion is both painful and funny to me, since I was "in the room" (both literally and figuratively) when Bill Joy wrote vi in 1975-76, right there on the 2nd floor and 5th floor of Evans Hall. (As with csh and some other tools of that era, Joy had a number of informal collaborators, including students. I don't think I wrote any part of ex/vi, but I did have some code in csh dealing with directory handling). There is absolutely no question as to the correct pronunciation; vi and ex were named and pronounced in accordance with all the other two-letter fundamental UNIX utilities/apps in V6 and V7, like ls, cp, rm, cc, as, ln, m4, and so forth. All were, and are, pronounced as two-letter initialisms. Three- and four-letter commands, like cat, yacc, diff, and so forth, were pronounced as words.
It is a matter of bemusement to me that 30 years later, not only have some people invented a new pronunciation based on looking at the spelling (but being unaware or indifferent to its origin), but seem to want to defend it as somehow legitimate. Imagine for a moment that you're a French person, well-schooled in your history-steeped language, and you hear some American not only pronounce "cliché" as "clitch", but insist that it's a valid alternative pronunciation, in "common use", and ought to be cited as such in the dictionary. Wouldn't you be embarrassed for the poor American? -- MCB 07:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
A recent editor added (regarding vim) equivalent in power to Emacs.
Now you've done it!
To Emacs partisans, nothing is as powerful as Emacs. The fusion power of a galaxy of suns powering Sagans worth of IBM Z/OS mainframe computers couldn't rival the power of Emacs. Surely, someone will be along to blast this statement soon.
Atlant 14:50, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Did Bill Joy or Evans Hall write it?
Why is there a picture of the Vim startup screen on the vi article? The two really are different, and the picture that used to be up, which showed simply a blank screen with tildes, did a better job of portraying the minimalist nature of the editor. In fact, I do not believe that plain vi even has a startup screen.-- Shutranm 18:50, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
what is the license of vi(m)? Is it GPL? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gflores ( talk • contribs)
I think the Trivia Section material should be preserved; it's very useful. Integration into the main article is fine, but removal would discard valuable information. Where else would you verify that the keyboard upon which vi was written had no cursor keys, and indeed see a layout of the keyboard? Thanks 4.235.36.117 14:24, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
How can such a simple image be copyrighted? I can understand the program itself, but a bunch of tildes and slashes I do not think qualifies. Can I make my own copy (from scratch) and license it as public domain? - Henry W. Schmitt 08:24, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
This screenshot is of a program that has been released under a free software license. As a derivative work of that program, this screenshot falls under the same license. | ||
Free software license:
|
Even though someone make complain that there is "how to" information here, the material which is presented is intended to show how the orthogonal command+motion is built up. While there were contemporary editors which could combine things, the keystroke-oriented editors tended to be haphazard in design (teco, for instance), and did not spend an appreciable amount of the design to making groups of functions work together. Inevitably, an attempt to convey this purely in words will run into looks-like-a-manual. Tedickey 14:30, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm not going to go into any edit war here, but I strongly disagree with this edit.
There is a vast difference between a user manual and a description of how a program works. What sets vi apart from other programs is the way commands are called - with simple short key strokes. It would not make any sense to write in an article about Word, that the program uses ctrl-c to copy text, as thousands of other programs use the same shortcut. However, when it comes to vi, it is of interest to see how illogical a program that has been used by millions of people over several decades works. Clearly, it is a very efficient approach for people who learn it, even though it probably has caused more grey hairs than all efforts of squaring the circle the last few thousand years.
That is in fact almost the only interesting thing with the program. The fact that there is a text editor called vi is of no particular interest at all. There are plenty of them.
The only information that properly conveyed this information was removed in that edit. Mlewan ( talk) 21:01, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Quoth the article:
Heh, heh. Surely there must be a more recent and/or accurate set of numbers out there? -- Jfruh 00:17, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Hi,
I wanted to know the full form of vi..... coz all commands of unix or linux has some or the other meaning n full form so i guess vi also shud hav sm....??? i read tht vi is a visual mode of ex or something but this wasnt really answer of my question!!!!!
~20 Aug 2009 VIKI —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.72.26.243 ( talk) 18:28, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Interview with Bill Joy http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html In the "History" section there's something need to be cited.And above is the url you would find the info. Below is the text: "Mike Horton brought his editor along from Bell Labs called hed for "Horton's editor." He was disappointed when vi won out over it. But vi had momentum with the local users - and Mark, somewhat out of frustration, went out and actually supported vi. That was nice, because I didn't have the patience to do it anymore. Just putting the termcap entries in that people would mail me would take hours a week, and I was tired after three or four years." In the context,it's around 1979.For the interview is taken in the August 1984. Hope it helps.Sorry for that i actually don't have that much time and ability to do the citation. :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.188.136.177 ( talk) 00:59, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Ok twice now I've tried to add the note "The correct title of this article is vi. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions." and it shows up in the preview but when I hit save it isn't there. Anyone know why this is happening? Thanks. Wolfrock 20:38, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
You people are nuts. Yes, the name is normally written vi and it makes us feel like we're on the inside when we point that out. But come on. Do you know the Wikipedia article about chickens has the title Chicken? Do you know why? Because it's a title. Furthermore, if you write the word "chickens" at the beginning of a sentence it is written "Chickens" because words are capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. Just because vi is normally written as a lowercase word doesn't mean it has some kind of force field that repels the elementary rules of usage and grammar. The correct title of the article is Vi. At the beginning of a sentence you should write Vi. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.7.179.158 ( talk) 15:42, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Just a reminder that instructional material, user manuals and guides, etc., belong in Wikibooks rather than here. (Please see WP:NOT.) I userfied the command guide that Hydratab inserted as User:Hydratab/vi-commands so that it can be added to Wikibooks if desired. Cheers, -- MCB 17:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Check http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/, which reproduces part of a previous interview. Some data can be included here. -- ReyBrujo 16:37, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
In particular, the following quote could be added
People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud
— Bill Joy, Linux Magazine, 1999
167.107.191.217 ( talk) 14:42, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Clearly someone with a dynamically assigned address in the Chinese netblock 210.77/16 wants to link to their blog about vi. Is it possible to create a rangeblock on this specific article? -- Autopilot ( talk) 17:36, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
From the vim docs:
["x]x Delete [count] characters under and after the cursor [into register x] (not |linewise|).
How about "under and after the cursor"?— Trevor Caira 14:40, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Adding a comment six years later ..... The whole approach of the vim documentation is wrong. You start with looking at what the 'x' command by itself does, which is, it deletes the character under the cursor and moves to the next character. You then apply the general vi rule that: a number in front of a command means "repeat that command [number] times".
Old_Wombat (
talk)
05:24, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Citing Raymond's TAOUP might at first seem a WP:RS, but reading the paragraph noted, Raymond betrays his ignorance of vi (he's a known Emacs user) by commenting that the various implementations of vi provide the same features. Raymond is in the quote relevant to this topic regurgitating the comments from the Jargon File. For this topic, a more suitable reference (discarding the jokes about "six") would be Arnold & Lamb, or Arnold TEDickey ( talk) 08:33, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Not a WP:RS, but providing some useful material for further investigation is this wiki TEDickey ( talk) 08:35, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I would like to observe that people are claiming that the program is pronounced in a certain way based on writing in a number of books written from a local area in the USA. If anything, the sources only state that "The following people believe that the editor is pronounced in a certain way". The sources absolutely do not indicate that the editor is ACTUALLY pronounced in any certain way, as they do not refer to things such as international surveys (or even locality surveys). This misappropriation of sources is very invalid and anyone who sticks to them is ignoring reality. 115.64.159.41 ( talk) 11:43, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
The "Vim-example.png" is noticeably not vi because of the status line. That makes the text shown asserting that it is vi, misleading (probably the figure itself should be removed from Wikipedia) TEDickey ( talk) 23:29, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
``and "i" to return to insert mode
Hello,
The lede of the article says the following:
This seems to me highly misleading. The survey in question did not have vim as an option, and given that it's more commonly used than vi in my experience, it doesn't make sense to say that "vi was the most widely used text editor among respondents", since that number doubtlessly includes many vim users.
I tried to remove this sentence and was reverted (because it was "reported correctly", which is true, but it's still misleading). I then tried to add the caveat that the survey did not include vim as a separate option and was reverted again.
I think it should be removed or modified to point out the fact that it encompasses all vi variants. InverseHypercube ( talk) 20:22, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
Xb2u7Zjzc32 ( talk) 07:20, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
"The name vi is pronounced..." it says. I have used Vi for the last seventeen years and I don't believe I have ever heard it pronounced Vee Eye no matter what Eric Raymond wrote in two of the references provided in the article. I don't really care how people pronounce it but it is so annoying in Wikipedia articles when editors try to impose their vision of the world on the rest of us. No doubt Vim should be pronounced Vee Eye Em... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.187.233.172 ( talk) 19:05, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
Please note that the pronunciation "vee eye" is not proven to be prevailing by any sources given. They merely suggest that the authors of a few books prefer "vee eye". Autopilot, perhaps you should actually examine the "reliable sources" you attempt to appropriate for your particular viewpoint.
115.64.159.41 (
talk)
11:44, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
xvi is a very small cross platform editor which might deserve a mention. You can find it at https://martinwguy.github.io/xvi/ and it's still maintained. 2001:985:d04c:1:a71:90ff:fe2e:dc90 ( talk) 11:02, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
I am wondering if Unicode support should not be added into the main article. I believe people would be interested if vi can support Unicode or not. I am not a vi user, so I have no way to check this myself. -- Saoshyant 15:11, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to try to put a date on vi's creation. The commonly-quoted date is 1976.
In this interview, Bill Joy says "it was probably '76". He apparently started it in 1975, but lost the ex source code in 1976. He started the screen editor late in '76, while listening to election results on the radio.
O'Reilly contradicts slightly, saying the ex Pascal source code was published with BSD early in 1977. That is consistent with ex/vi being written in late 1976. But I have not found any information about when the name vi came into use. -- Nate Silva 01:01, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable with capitalizing it as "Vi" at the beginning of a sentence? Or is there a Wikipedia policy about mangling case-sensitive stuff? -- Kimiko 13:12, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
vi looks weird when the monospace font doesn't look at all like the variable width font used for the rest of the text (most mono fonts don't look so good in between varwidth text). Leaving it as vi everywhere looks best imho. -- Kimiko 13:44, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Is the screenshot in this article "vi" or "nvi"? I don't think the original "vi" shows the status line at the bottom of the screen (Solaris (:version = Version SVR4.0, Solaris 2.5.0) and HP-UX (:version = HP Version $ B.11.23 Jul 15 2003 02:09:47 $) do not), whereas "nvi" (:version = Version 1.79 (10/23/96) The CSRG, University of California, Berkeley.) does. — Lady Lysine Ikinsile 09:01, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)
Except, vi is not actually modal, or at least, that's how it was explained to me. "Don't think of vi as being modal!". It's actually a stateful filter :-). It's a very very fine distinction, but vi is based on ex, and you can actually still use it as a Filter_program! Kim Bruning 09:35, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Ah well, you left your funny-bone at home today you say? Very well, heres a slightly more serious answer.
In vi, you can do things like:
20iI am not naughty^M^[
(where ^M is return, and ^[ is escape)
I think my school teachers knew about this before I did, because for some reason they always insisted that I use handwriting for this kind of thing.
The above works because it is interpreted as a single command by vi, and not as a sequence of mode switches like some folks might expect.
I hope that gives you a bit of an idea at least, I'm a bit too sleepy to go figuring out something more decent. I hope this gives you a first inkling. If it doesn't, please forgive me, and maybe I'll type something more enlightening tomorrow. :)
Have a nice evening! Kim Bruning 20:33, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
There's 2 answers to this. I'll just do one for now:
what does :
20ifoobar^[
do?
Try it. There's something a bit wrong there wrt assuming vi is a modal editor :-) I'm terribly sorry about not giving this my all, but for some reason I keep being either tired or have a headache when logging on to wikipedia recently. Kim Bruning 17:44, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Okay, well I'm really spending way too much time on this, but here goes.
Consider these 3 lines:
#1 echo -e '$_="just another crazy hacker\\n";\ns/crazy/perl/;\nprint;\n '| perl #2 echo -e 'a\njust another perl hacker\n.\ns/perl/ex/\nw! testme'| ex && cat testme
#3 echo -e 'ajust another perl hacker\E:s/perl/vi\n:w! testme\n:q!'| vi && cat testme
They all have similar input, and equivalent output. The thing is, there's probably not many folks who would say the top 2 lines are some form of modal input.
Based on what I think is being said here, you might claim that line 3 *is* modal in some way.
Okay, that's interesting.
So did I predict right, and will you be calling the 3rd line modal? If so, why? I'm interested in hearing your arguments. :-)
Quickly answering your question "why does modal not apply to vi", well, the answer to that was right at the start of this debate: vi is actually a stateful filter.
See if you can look at it this way: vi is a special mode of ex, which takes input in a specific way, and parses it as a special case of ex commands.
Kim Bruning 08:49, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
From the source code point of view. I have been working on 2 of the major vi clones, elvis and nvi, and they do not have anything that is called "mode", as in "insert mode" or "append mode". "i" and "a" are commands, not modes. As someone said in the above, "i" or "a" can be repeated by numbers (10ia<ESC> inserts 10 "a"s). I will have to check the real vi (now ex-vi) but i believe it goes the same,
Jun-ihiro itojun Hagino 12:42, 9 Sep 2007 (UTC)
Although I'm not a vi user (I'm a BBEdit guy), I'm wondering if there are plans to promote this article as a feature article, considering that Emacs recently got its 5 minutes of fame. Surely we can tap into the rivalry in a good way, as opposed to the typical flame war. :-)
Moved from main page:
But it fairly frequently is pronounced /vi/. Shouldn't Wikipedia be descriptive rather than prescriptive?
I take it it's meant to be pronounced "V. I", like the two letters. We need to fix this:
as the two things don't agree. See SAMPA. "V.I." is [vi: aI]. The often-used but incorrect pronunciation is (I'm guessing) like the word "vye" as in "vye for his affections": [vaI]. COuls someone with knowledge of phonetics AND this program check? -- Tarquin
I'm generally in favor of descriptive-rather-than-prescriptive, but as a 20-year Unix veteran, I will verify that indeed, anyone who says "vye" or "six" will be instantly tagged as a clueless newbie. It's "vee eye". In fact, it's "vee eye" even when it's "vim" :-) I'm not that familiar with SAMPA, but I'll look it up and try to fix that. -- LDC
If it's "V. I" like the two letters it's [vi: aI]. I'll fix that on the subject page. -- Tarquin
The "vai" pronunciation appears to be standard usage at Sun Education in Melbourne, Australia. So I changed the entry to say 'generally' not pronounced that way. In any case, it's evident there's enough controversy around it to mention it - David Gerard 16:06, Jan 9, 2004 (UTC)
I've converted the SAMPA to IPA (without prejudice to the debate as to hte question how it should be pronounced - by the way from my UNIX days I always remember it being called "vye" as a single word - and removed the convertIPA template. rossb 14:22, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
For goodness sakes - it appears to be pronounced in one of two ways, can't we just accept that, get over it and have the article show the two options (thereby avoiding this whole silly schoolboy argument on the front page)? For the record, I call it vi. And always will do. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 147.114.226.173 ( talk • contribs) .
I have cited the pronunciation to a reliable source in a footnote. While I am sure that some people pronounce it differently, Wikipedia sourcing policy would require that the alternate pronunciation be cited to a reliable source as well, and I have yet to see one cited. Plenty of people pronounce "nuclear" as "nucular", but we don't put than in a Wikipedia article either. Anecdotal assertions like "The 'vai' pronunciation appears to be standard usage at Sun Education in Melbourne, Australia" are not encyclopedic. Wikipedia is not a dictionary of regional or subcultural English, so we don't need to record various people's random mispronunciations of things. So, if you find a reliable source that gives an alternate pronunciation, feel free to add it. Otherwise, it no more belongs in the article than "nucular" does. -- MCB 22:36, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Haeleth, be assured I had no idea you were among those who used what you would like to be considered a legitimate alternative pronunciation, and I certainly intended no personal attack; I assumed you were defending an abstract point. That said, this discussion is both painful and funny to me, since I was "in the room" (both literally and figuratively) when Bill Joy wrote vi in 1975-76, right there on the 2nd floor and 5th floor of Evans Hall. (As with csh and some other tools of that era, Joy had a number of informal collaborators, including students. I don't think I wrote any part of ex/vi, but I did have some code in csh dealing with directory handling). There is absolutely no question as to the correct pronunciation; vi and ex were named and pronounced in accordance with all the other two-letter fundamental UNIX utilities/apps in V6 and V7, like ls, cp, rm, cc, as, ln, m4, and so forth. All were, and are, pronounced as two-letter initialisms. Three- and four-letter commands, like cat, yacc, diff, and so forth, were pronounced as words.
It is a matter of bemusement to me that 30 years later, not only have some people invented a new pronunciation based on looking at the spelling (but being unaware or indifferent to its origin), but seem to want to defend it as somehow legitimate. Imagine for a moment that you're a French person, well-schooled in your history-steeped language, and you hear some American not only pronounce "cliché" as "clitch", but insist that it's a valid alternative pronunciation, in "common use", and ought to be cited as such in the dictionary. Wouldn't you be embarrassed for the poor American? -- MCB 07:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
A recent editor added (regarding vim) equivalent in power to Emacs.
Now you've done it!
To Emacs partisans, nothing is as powerful as Emacs. The fusion power of a galaxy of suns powering Sagans worth of IBM Z/OS mainframe computers couldn't rival the power of Emacs. Surely, someone will be along to blast this statement soon.
Atlant 14:50, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Did Bill Joy or Evans Hall write it?
Why is there a picture of the Vim startup screen on the vi article? The two really are different, and the picture that used to be up, which showed simply a blank screen with tildes, did a better job of portraying the minimalist nature of the editor. In fact, I do not believe that plain vi even has a startup screen.-- Shutranm 18:50, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
what is the license of vi(m)? Is it GPL? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gflores ( talk • contribs)
I think the Trivia Section material should be preserved; it's very useful. Integration into the main article is fine, but removal would discard valuable information. Where else would you verify that the keyboard upon which vi was written had no cursor keys, and indeed see a layout of the keyboard? Thanks 4.235.36.117 14:24, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
How can such a simple image be copyrighted? I can understand the program itself, but a bunch of tildes and slashes I do not think qualifies. Can I make my own copy (from scratch) and license it as public domain? - Henry W. Schmitt 08:24, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
This screenshot is of a program that has been released under a free software license. As a derivative work of that program, this screenshot falls under the same license. | ||
Free software license:
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Even though someone make complain that there is "how to" information here, the material which is presented is intended to show how the orthogonal command+motion is built up. While there were contemporary editors which could combine things, the keystroke-oriented editors tended to be haphazard in design (teco, for instance), and did not spend an appreciable amount of the design to making groups of functions work together. Inevitably, an attempt to convey this purely in words will run into looks-like-a-manual. Tedickey 14:30, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm not going to go into any edit war here, but I strongly disagree with this edit.
There is a vast difference between a user manual and a description of how a program works. What sets vi apart from other programs is the way commands are called - with simple short key strokes. It would not make any sense to write in an article about Word, that the program uses ctrl-c to copy text, as thousands of other programs use the same shortcut. However, when it comes to vi, it is of interest to see how illogical a program that has been used by millions of people over several decades works. Clearly, it is a very efficient approach for people who learn it, even though it probably has caused more grey hairs than all efforts of squaring the circle the last few thousand years.
That is in fact almost the only interesting thing with the program. The fact that there is a text editor called vi is of no particular interest at all. There are plenty of them.
The only information that properly conveyed this information was removed in that edit. Mlewan ( talk) 21:01, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Quoth the article:
Heh, heh. Surely there must be a more recent and/or accurate set of numbers out there? -- Jfruh 00:17, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Hi,
I wanted to know the full form of vi..... coz all commands of unix or linux has some or the other meaning n full form so i guess vi also shud hav sm....??? i read tht vi is a visual mode of ex or something but this wasnt really answer of my question!!!!!
~20 Aug 2009 VIKI —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.72.26.243 ( talk) 18:28, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Interview with Bill Joy http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html In the "History" section there's something need to be cited.And above is the url you would find the info. Below is the text: "Mike Horton brought his editor along from Bell Labs called hed for "Horton's editor." He was disappointed when vi won out over it. But vi had momentum with the local users - and Mark, somewhat out of frustration, went out and actually supported vi. That was nice, because I didn't have the patience to do it anymore. Just putting the termcap entries in that people would mail me would take hours a week, and I was tired after three or four years." In the context,it's around 1979.For the interview is taken in the August 1984. Hope it helps.Sorry for that i actually don't have that much time and ability to do the citation. :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.188.136.177 ( talk) 00:59, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Ok twice now I've tried to add the note "The correct title of this article is vi. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions." and it shows up in the preview but when I hit save it isn't there. Anyone know why this is happening? Thanks. Wolfrock 20:38, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
You people are nuts. Yes, the name is normally written vi and it makes us feel like we're on the inside when we point that out. But come on. Do you know the Wikipedia article about chickens has the title Chicken? Do you know why? Because it's a title. Furthermore, if you write the word "chickens" at the beginning of a sentence it is written "Chickens" because words are capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. Just because vi is normally written as a lowercase word doesn't mean it has some kind of force field that repels the elementary rules of usage and grammar. The correct title of the article is Vi. At the beginning of a sentence you should write Vi. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.7.179.158 ( talk) 15:42, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Just a reminder that instructional material, user manuals and guides, etc., belong in Wikibooks rather than here. (Please see WP:NOT.) I userfied the command guide that Hydratab inserted as User:Hydratab/vi-commands so that it can be added to Wikibooks if desired. Cheers, -- MCB 17:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Check http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/, which reproduces part of a previous interview. Some data can be included here. -- ReyBrujo 16:37, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
In particular, the following quote could be added
People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud
— Bill Joy, Linux Magazine, 1999
167.107.191.217 ( talk) 14:42, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Clearly someone with a dynamically assigned address in the Chinese netblock 210.77/16 wants to link to their blog about vi. Is it possible to create a rangeblock on this specific article? -- Autopilot ( talk) 17:36, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
From the vim docs:
["x]x Delete [count] characters under and after the cursor [into register x] (not |linewise|).
How about "under and after the cursor"?— Trevor Caira 14:40, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Adding a comment six years later ..... The whole approach of the vim documentation is wrong. You start with looking at what the 'x' command by itself does, which is, it deletes the character under the cursor and moves to the next character. You then apply the general vi rule that: a number in front of a command means "repeat that command [number] times".
Old_Wombat (
talk)
05:24, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Citing Raymond's TAOUP might at first seem a WP:RS, but reading the paragraph noted, Raymond betrays his ignorance of vi (he's a known Emacs user) by commenting that the various implementations of vi provide the same features. Raymond is in the quote relevant to this topic regurgitating the comments from the Jargon File. For this topic, a more suitable reference (discarding the jokes about "six") would be Arnold & Lamb, or Arnold TEDickey ( talk) 08:33, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Not a WP:RS, but providing some useful material for further investigation is this wiki TEDickey ( talk) 08:35, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
I would like to observe that people are claiming that the program is pronounced in a certain way based on writing in a number of books written from a local area in the USA. If anything, the sources only state that "The following people believe that the editor is pronounced in a certain way". The sources absolutely do not indicate that the editor is ACTUALLY pronounced in any certain way, as they do not refer to things such as international surveys (or even locality surveys). This misappropriation of sources is very invalid and anyone who sticks to them is ignoring reality. 115.64.159.41 ( talk) 11:43, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
The "Vim-example.png" is noticeably not vi because of the status line. That makes the text shown asserting that it is vi, misleading (probably the figure itself should be removed from Wikipedia) TEDickey ( talk) 23:29, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
``and "i" to return to insert mode
Hello,
The lede of the article says the following:
This seems to me highly misleading. The survey in question did not have vim as an option, and given that it's more commonly used than vi in my experience, it doesn't make sense to say that "vi was the most widely used text editor among respondents", since that number doubtlessly includes many vim users.
I tried to remove this sentence and was reverted (because it was "reported correctly", which is true, but it's still misleading). I then tried to add the caveat that the survey did not include vim as a separate option and was reverted again.
I think it should be removed or modified to point out the fact that it encompasses all vi variants. InverseHypercube ( talk) 20:22, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
Xb2u7Zjzc32 ( talk) 07:20, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
"The name vi is pronounced..." it says. I have used Vi for the last seventeen years and I don't believe I have ever heard it pronounced Vee Eye no matter what Eric Raymond wrote in two of the references provided in the article. I don't really care how people pronounce it but it is so annoying in Wikipedia articles when editors try to impose their vision of the world on the rest of us. No doubt Vim should be pronounced Vee Eye Em... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.187.233.172 ( talk) 19:05, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
Please note that the pronunciation "vee eye" is not proven to be prevailing by any sources given. They merely suggest that the authors of a few books prefer "vee eye". Autopilot, perhaps you should actually examine the "reliable sources" you attempt to appropriate for your particular viewpoint.
115.64.159.41 (
talk)
11:44, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
xvi is a very small cross platform editor which might deserve a mention. You can find it at https://martinwguy.github.io/xvi/ and it's still maintained. 2001:985:d04c:1:a71:90ff:fe2e:dc90 ( talk) 11:02, 13 June 2020 (UTC)