Talk:vi (text editor)

Requested move 1 December 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) NmWTfs85lXusaybq (talk) 04:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

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Vi → Vi (text editor) – (and redirect Vi to VI) Even with the second letter lowercase, this is a simple two-letter combination for which there is no primary topic. This subject's long-term significance not at the same height as primary topics Ra, Ur, qi, or pi. Google Search's first results are for the text editor, but this may be inauthentic – Google also jokingly displays Did you mean: EMACS. A Google Scholar search for "vi" -author:vi shows results almost entirely for "vi" as the Roman numeral (capitalized of course). Lastly, this topic doesn't significantly clear Vi (League of Legends) in terms of pageviews. Hameltion (talk | contribs) 17:30, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes!(but*): I buy it. (To me), (almost always), "VI" and "vi" are just annoying things to write instead of [6 (number)]. Where that is not the case, (in context), "VI" and ".vi" are US or British [Virgin Islands]; v.i. is [verb intransitive]; "Vi" is Vi [Violet (given name)]; and yes "vi" can be [vi (text editor)], but only because I have (rarely) read of it. (Btw, I never heard of vi, and can't recall having heard it spoken.) I think someone looking up "vi", "VI", "Vi", "V.I.", or "v.i." probably is not looking for "6", and is less likely to be looking for [vi (text editor)] than for one of the others. So yes, move [Vi] to [Vi (text editor)], *WITH REDIRECT (so that the existing 7 redirects to [Vi] get automatically corrected). AFTER the corrections happen, you could change [Vi] to redirect to [VI] (the existing disambiguation page), -OR- move [VI] to [Vi] (is there a norm? A quick look finds CA, CI, DU, EM, FM, IL, LB, MD, NC, ND, NY, PC, PR, and WA; but Bo, Do, Nm, Oe, Or, Oz, and Pa. (NJ, Nj, NZ, and Nz redirect to articles.) -A876 (talk) 21:15, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

• Comment Without a way to differentiate on the lower-case first letter, it's probably true that there's no primary topic for vi/Vi, though an argument could be made on the basis of long-term significance. However, it's also true that the text editor is by far the most common destination from VI. Wikinav shows it having twice the outgoing pageviews of Vodaphone Idea and four times the outgoing pageviews of Vi (League of Legends). And this in spite of lower-case vi also having its own page. If vi is merged into the DAB, the DAB should lead off with a "VI most commonly refers to:" section a la Mercury. I'm happy to add this section, but if there are any objections now is the time to raise them, not later. Dan Bloch (talk) 18:54, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

• Support there are uses that get many more more views[] like British Virgin Islands with 37,909 and Vi (League of Legends) has 8,342 compared with 16,124 for this one. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:29, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
• Support per nom. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:33, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vi Modes

"...including allowing the cursor keys to work in input mode" could be referring to Insert mode, as mentioned earlier in the article under "Interface". I haven't heard Insert mode referred to as Input mode before in any documentation or articles about Vi, so I'm skeptical as to its usage here. Also, pressing Escape while in Insert mode does not enter Command mode as the article suggests; commands are entered by prefixing them with a colon. Finally, there is a third mode that isn't mentioned at all, Replace mode, which is entered by pressing capital R while in Normal mode. TechPersonYT (talk) 23:39, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Rivalry with Emacs

Is is worth mentioning the Editor War? Quoting that article, “the rivalry [between users of the Emacs and vi] has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.” --2001:16B8:ABA2:6E00:10F6:5BAB:6090:730A (talk) 11:41, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Influences from contemporary MIT editors

According to an email from Dan Halbert, vi was influenced by Emacs: "I had used Emacs at MIT as an undergraduate. Bill would sometimes ask me, "how do they do that in Emacs", or ITS, and then riff on a feature and put it into vi or whatever." "A lot of the vi visual-mode commands were inspired by emacs, like forward/back words, sentences/statements, paragraphs/functions. I specifically remember explaining the hierarchy of ctrl-f, meta-f, ctrl-meta-f, etc., and then Bill went off and put in '{' and '}' and similar commands. And the "yank" commands were named after ctrl-Y and other "yank" commands in emacs." https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2024-October/030931.html

According to an email from Bill Joy, vi was influenced by DOC (also called ZED) and Emacs: "if anything, the open and visual commands were inspired by vaughn pratts "doc" editor (teco macros) from mit, but were actually mostly designed by me, from scratch. i later cribbed additional ideas from doc and from stallman emacs." https://archive.org/details/text-editor-email

Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 10:08, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

vi is ex

WRT "Thus, vi is not the evolution of ex, vi is ex." Beg questions: If vi _is_ ex, then why does ex still exist as a separate program? Or does it? Stevebroshar (talk) 13:37, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

In traditional Unix, vi and ex aren't separate programs, they're a single program with multiple directory entries (hard links). This program provides vi's behavior if it's invoked as "vi", and ex's behavior if invoked as "ex".

As to why does ex still exist, I'd say only for historical reasons. Danbloch (talk) 15:05, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Yes. I came to that conclusion (that they are just one program) as I was reading other articles after posting this topic. Thanks for the confirmation/agreement. I guess I wouldn't say that ex still exists for historical reasons. It exists bc it _is_ vi; or vi is it. They co-exist; just as do all the voices in my head :) I'm not sure why we need two articles: vi (text editor) and ex (text editor). That fact is what got me confused: thinking they were different programs. At the very least, the fact that they are the same program should be more prominently described. And maybe the articles should be merged. Since vi is _way_ more common term, ex should redirect to vi. The ex article is super short as-is. Stevebroshar (talk) 13:45, 3 December 2025 (UTC)