18 Jul
2025
18 Jul
'25
10:53 p.m.
Yes, the editors can be very much a religious thing. There are actually
three major actively maintained versions of nvi in current use:
- Nvi1 - https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git
- Nvi2 - https://github.com/lichray/nvi2
- OpenVi - https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi
Not directly related to Nvi, but Elvis (https://github.com/mbert/elvis)
and Xvi (https://github.com/martinwguy/xvi) are also still maintained
and have die-hard users.
I actually know of several people who use Andy Valencia's Vim fork known
as "Vim57" (https://sources.vsta.org:7100/vim57/tree) which forked from,
you guessed it, Vim 5.7. His fork consists of simplifying the code and
mostly removing things, for those that like Vim but prefer speed and
minimalism.
I use OpenVi quite a bit, and if you took away everything else from
me, I'd be able to get along just fine, but I'm certainly a Vim user,
and I spend most of my day driving NeoVim now.
Teach your kid Vim! You can't go wrong knowing Vim, and that knowledge
makes it easy drive the other editors in the Vi family (Vile, etc.) if
he wants to.
--
Jeffrey H. Johnson
trnsz(a)pobox.com
Though I'm teaching my kid vim because I strongly
suspect vim is much
more widely used. This is starting to feel like a BSD vs Linux argument
and we know how that turned out.