vi
"... before that summer, we could only type in uppercase. That summer we got lowercase ROMs for our terminals. It was really exciting to finally use lowercase." — Bill Joy
vi is probably not for those who want a less-than-minimal editor. With that in mind,
is a clone of the base OpenBSD vi that adds features that I want (or removes that which I do not want). Hacking on an old code base can also be educational, and vim (even a fairly minimal build with zero plugins) had gotten rather too sluggish for my taste (30 millisecond startup times, ouch!). Anyways, the changes to vi, in no particular order include:
- the arrow keys are disabled. keep them fingers on the home row
- remove support for ^@ as first input entring insert mode
- remove ex_ncheck, that "more files to edit!!" thing is annoying
- most :W :Q forms are automatically downcased
- moved the preserve command after previous
- greatly simplify the configuration file reads to one file read
- ... but then complicate this to load ~/.exrc.c for *.c files, etc
- make autowrite happen in most cases. breaks POSIX compliance
- remove many messages to avoid interruptions (at a cost)
- add new command to put a string into a buffer (hint: @ is nifty)
- rework J to better handle lisp and who puts two spaces after a period??
This business of using the same editor for 10 years - it's like living in the same place for 10 years. None of us does it. Everyone moves once a year, right?
— Bill Joy