Who invented vi editor

The vi clones, which began to emerge in the late '80s and early '90s, were widely adopted due to more permissive licensing. Joy's vi implementation was based on the original ATT version of ed, which meant that the code was not freely redistributable.

The first two prominent vi clones were Stevie and Elvis. It was somewhat primitive but attracted a modest following. Elvis, which was first released in , was more sophisticated and was designed to offer more functionality.

Elvis was the first vi clone to introduce support for syntax highlighting. Although Elvis still has some users and remains popular in the Slackware community, it hasn't seen a major update since Elvis replaced Joy's vi in the original port of BSD, but the BSD developers later produced a new clone called nvi that was intended to more closely match the behavior of Joy's implementation.

The nvi editor is still shipped today by the BSD family of operating systems. The earliest version of Vim was developed on the Amiga by Bram Moolenaar in Moolenaar was dissatisfied with the vi clones that were available for the Amiga platform and set out to make one that came closer to matching vi's feature set. He based his new editor on Stevie, which he has said was the best Amiga-compatible vi clone at the time.

The first version of Vim that was released to the general public was 1. Following its public debut, users began contributing patches. I did find a few so-called 'clones', but none of them was good enough; so I took the best one, and started improving it. At first the main goal was to be able to do all that Vi could do. Gradually I added some additional features, like multi-level undo," Moolenaar wrote in the first issue of Free Software Magazine , back in After some time I got the impression it was useful for others, and sent it out into the world.

Since then I'm working more and more on making the program work well for a large audience. It's fun to create something useful. Also, there is a nice group of co-authors and power users, which is very inspiring. Moolenaar drafted his own loose copyleft license for the software. The license grants the user broad freedom to use, distribute, and repurpose the code, but gives the maintainer the right to ask for improvements to be contributed back to the project.

Some clarifications were added to Vim's license in the version 6. Vim is an open source software project, but it's also charityware. He serves as treasurer of the foundation and visits the site in Uganda nearly every year to monitor the center's progress. The name was changed in when version 1. It gained support for multiple buffers in version 3.

Version 4. Many, many other features were added along the way. Although Vim was originally designed to be used in a terminal, there are several graphical frontends built with various user interface toolkits that add conventional menus, toolbars, and scrollbars.

The latest major release of Vim was version 7, which was released in It introduced some particularly significant features, including native support for spellchecking, an autocompletion system, a tab interface, and undo branches. The most recent minor version update was version 7. The full scope of Vim's advantages are difficult to articulate to users who are unfamiliar with the editor.

Although a full explanation of how Vim works is beyond the scope of this article, the following is a small assortment of useful features:. For example,. Again, newlines have no special significance for these sam commands. The text acted upon and resulting from these commands is not necessarily bounded by newlines, although for connection with UNIX programs, newlines may be necessary to obey conventions.

Paper submitted for the Linux It is now included with every Linux distribution and has been given an award for the best open-source text editor. This article will discuss the current status of Vim, placing it in the context of the past and the future. Vi compatible Vim started as a replacement for Vi on the Amiga. Being used to Vi on Unix systems, the author wanted to use this powerful editor on his newly obtained Amiga too.

There was a program called "Stevie", which lacked many commands and contained bugs; but since the source code was available, it was possible to enhance the program. Gradually more Vi commands were added and problems fixed. Then new useful commands were added that Vi didn't have: multi-level undo, text formatting, multiple windows, etc.

But Vim still tries to be very Vi compatible, if that is what you want. For most commands you will not notice any difference between Vi and Vim. But some Vi commands work in a clumsy way and some may be considered a leftover from the old days of slow computers and teletypes.

Here Vim gives the user a choice of doing it the old Vi way, or doing it in an improved Vim way. For example, in Vi the "u" command toggles the text between the situation before and after a change. Vim offers multi-level undo. What commands to use to get to the multiple levels?

One way would be to use the ". Nvi follows this approach. But this is not Vi compatible: Typing "xxu. In Nvi the ". The author of Vim doesn't like these unexpected and obscure incompatibilities. Efficient Editing With vim Focuses on Vim rather than Vi, but this is a great, very terse and simple intro. Vi Editor A fine introduction and reference manual.

Good lay-out. Vi helpfile A terse overview of basic commands with a little explanation on each of them. It is not a tutorial, but rather a reference manual. I think it is close to being complete. Vi macros This page focuses on macros in Vi. It is not meant for beginners, but rather for those that want to master the art of writing complex macros. Graphical vi-vim Cheat Sheet and Tutorial A cheat sheet keyboard overlay.

Unix vi Editor Introduces the basics in a pretty comprehensible way. Vi Documents A very basic introduction. Good if you're new. Also contains an incomplete, but clear reference manual. Contains many examples. Not complete, though. First Steps: Vi A step-by-step tutorial. Not bad for a first start. Vi basics A very short introduction that doesn't really help you a great deal. The Vi Editor A very basic one-page introduction. Vi for Smarties A dumb, step by step tutorial insulting your intelligence.

Online Vi quick reference That's what it is. Vi Tutorial A very slow start. Contains some highly confusing pictures. A beginner's guide to Vi This is not at all a beginner's guide. It is very incomplete and too terse for beginners. Introduction to Vi A lot of hot air. No content. The version that Moolenaar used had been released on Fred Fish disk Someone else had written a series of vi macros that, when run through a properly vi -compatible editor, could solve a randomly generated maze.

Moolenaar was able to get these macros working in Vim. Moolenaar, with the occasional help of various internet collaborators, added features to Vim at a steady clip.

Vim 2. Vim 3. Vim also now saved each buffer to a swap file, so that edited text could survive a crash. Vimscript made its first appearance in Vim 5. In , Vim was voted the most popular editor among Linux Journal readers.

While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the Editor Wars are over and that Vim won. How did Vim become so successful? Obviously people like the features that Vim has to offer. But I would argue that the long history behind Vim illustrates that it had more advantages than just its feature set. If you enjoyed this post, more like it come out every four weeks! New post! This time we're taking a look at the Altair , the very first home computer, and how to simulate it on your modern PC.

If both values are specified, it gives the result n x m combinations. The operator can take the following values:. If the object is the line in which cursor is now, the operator is used in double: cc, yy, dd. If such a text exists, it will be found in the file down from the cursor, to the end of file , and cursor will move to that place.