OpenVi

Do you have a place for any nvi tips and tricks? Or any macros you have shared? So far I have Matt Widmann's notes: https://mattwidmann.net/notes/the-nvi-text-editor/ vi mail archive (not much, mirrored) Learning the vi and vim editors (O'Reilly) johnsonjh@github work on OpenVi: https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi HN comments around OpenVi, nvi, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394952

The behavior of the traditional vi is much different than vim and other clones. Nvi was a actually a re-implementation of the traditional vi for 4BSD (to be clean of AT&T code) and thus was originally intended to be bug-for-bug compatible, but breaking away where the original vi behavior was nonsensical or terrible. For vim, `set compatible` or `set cp` is close, but still not traditional vi by any means. A multibyte variant of the traditional vi is maintained at https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/. Nvi (now on version 1.8x) is also maintained - https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git Nvi2 is yet another fork of Nvi, https://github.com/lichray/nvi2 Despite the very similar names, all of these editors have a variety of different features, and are structured very differently. Nvi has a concept of a front-end and a back-end (which uses the BDB d

Hi, I'm the "perpetrator" responsible for OpenVi. Apologies to everyone! /s I've added details to the README to hopefully explain why it exists: https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi#why The OpenVi ChangeLog at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi/master/Ch... includes all the history going back to 1993's Nvi 0.93. Nvi 1.79 was released in 1996, which is the version OpenBSD's vi was derived from. The ChangeLog entries are only a summary of the full commit messages - the complete details are in OpenBSD's CVS tree, and viewable a bit easier via GitHub (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/usr.bin/vi) Changes to the (OpenVi bundled) OpenBSD regular expression engine are not included in the legacy ChangeLog, but you can see that development in the CVS tree or via GitHub as well (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/mas

It isn't really an "old" version of Nvi by any means - the development went in a different direction. OpenBSD's vi has been developed mostly independently since being imported back in 1997. The documentation has been updated to explain the rationale - see https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi#why In the 25 years since the "fork", OpenBSD vi has diverged significantly from Nvi1 (as Nvi2 has diverged from Nvi1 as well). It has grown much smaller and more compact - one might argue more focused. Much of the code has been simplified and many features removed, rather than added. Still, it has adopted features and taken some fixes back from Nvi1/Nvi2 versions and other variants, such as adopting support for expandtab from NetBSD's variant. You can get a good idea of the history of this particular fork by reviewing the ChangeLog at https://raw.gith