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Comment by bch | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware I may be too pedantic, but it bothers me when people seem to completely conflate vim with vi. For example, -vi- was released in 1976, and vim not until 1991, despite what the article claims. In the meantime, I'll keep happily using nvi, and keeping the kids off my lawn.

edit: links...

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29

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I think you're going to have to lot further than that to be too pedantic for a discussion of programming editors.

As a relative latecomer to vim, I think your distinction is worthy remembering. If you didn't start with vi, it's easy to assume that all the power and cool stuff is the result of improvements and not realize how much just plain old vi could/can do.

About being pedantic, "going a lot further" -- being a pedant is all a cultural construct, though, isn't it? We're in a time where the lack of distinction between vim/vi is displayed so often that it's not hard to imagine a group of people looking at my original comment and saying "to hell with you, you -are- pedantic, old-school, and vim -is- vi. But better."

I'm really happy there are enough people who apparently appreciate (if not fully agree with) my comment to upvote it, though. I don't care about the karma, but happy to see signs of kindred spirits :)

And I thought I was the only person left who still uses nvi...

NetBSD ships w/ nvi in-base. I don't have any other *BSD systems available at the moment, but according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi#Credits_and_distribution it's the default in at least the "big 3" BSD distros (Net, Free, and Open; I don't know about DragonFly).

There are more than just two of us nvi users, and we're in good company :)

edit: This suggests DragonFlyBSD is nvi too, which isn't really surprising: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=vi

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