An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi (1980) | Hacker News Reader

An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi (1980)

ex-vi.sourceforge.net

41 pointsguerrilla22 comments

A curious bit from Wikipedia:

In discussing the origins of vi and why he discontinued development, Joy said:

I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

not sure if originally released as such, but at one point, part of a larger collection:

https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/bsd/lite2/usd.html

(missing papers were redacted due to USL vs UCB suit; most are floating around the net if you google hard enough for them)

was also released in in spiral-bound print form through USENIX for at least 4.3BSD (and I think one or both of 4.2BSD or 4.4BSD).

if you see references to 'USD' or 'PSD' or 'SMM' in manual pages, they are referring to this.

shameless opportunity for a personal take:

Unix from v7-4.4BSD was always a self-contained and self-hosting source+binary+documentation collection with a common source lineage to bell labs and its surrounding culture; therefore opengroup certified posix is not unix, despite whatever copyright law might actually say.

You can find the original yacc and lex papers in Google scholar and elsewhere by the way. I haven't checked for m4 yet though. Original ed(1) paper here too [1]

1. http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/a_tutorial_introduction_t...

Now there's a url I haven't seen in a loooong time. A long time.

Interesting it says it's "Pronounced vee-eye". Everyone I know just pronounces it vai.

I can confirm that Bill Joy pronounced it "vee-eye". No one seems to be confused by the "vai" pronunciation, though, so whatever.

I went a long time without seeing links to sourceforge, but more recently it's been popping up a lot (because I've been searching for older titles a lot).

Many projects never migrated elsewhere, including at least some still under development.

They all moved to gee-eye-tee Hub

Funny, I've never ever heard it pronounced anything but "vee-eye"

Now oddly, VIM is "vim", not "vee-eye-emm". Unless there are those that do spell it out.

I mainly only ever heard/said vee-eye, then somewhere along the way I came across vai (by the younguns mostly). Now I'm all mucked up and ending saying it either way when I only really want to say vee-eye

Vim happens to be a real word, which I guess makes it easier to pronounce as such.

I’ve only ever seen “vai” recognized as a sort of anti-shibboleth identifying newbies, who are then corrected.

And it's not like I'm that young. I started using it in 1989 at uni.

> Everyone I know just pronounces it vai.

No men allowed in town! </botw>

Jokes aside, am I the only person who's only ever pronounced it vee? I don't really interact with anyone else who uses it in person, so I've only ever really seen it in text.

Haha. Ah yes, the rare third pronunciation! I’ve honestly never heard ‘via’ or ‘vee’. ‘Vee-eye’ is most certainly the correct way, as any old timer will tell you :)

Thus I've learned today. It makes sense now that I think about it, along with ls, rm, cp etc.

I just never put two and two together, but at least now I know :)

Heh, like a lot of things in programming, there are always multiple camps on pronunciations. I always heard vee-eye from the senior dev I started with. Sounds like a lot of folk do say ‘via’ though. You should start the ‘vee’ camp and see if it sticks :)

Perhaps I will, might be fun.

Just don't pronounce it "six"

Or, as a Roman citizen would, “sex”.

No, I'm right there with you. I'm young enough (which is saying increasingly less) to have encountered vim and then vi, rather than the other way around. Vee came as the most natural way of pronouncing vim without the M.

That's exactly what happened with me, I wonder if that's where the pronunciation will end up over time.

I just pronounce it as "vi", not "vee-eye", but simply: vi. :D That last "i" is not "eye" either.

The letter "v" is the same as the letter "v" in verbose (I think), and the letter "i" is the same as the letter "i" in "instead".

Run nvi,nvi2 if you need UTF-8: Then, from within vi:

    :exusage
    :viusage

Basic config:

    echo "set sm showmode ru" >> ~/.exrc
    echo "set ts=2" >> ~/.exrc
    echo "set ai" >> ~/.exec

You don't need much more.

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