Visual Interface

tool, text (vi) /V-I/, /vi:/, *never* /siks/ A screeneditor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD

release. vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and a

nearly undisputed hacker favourite outside of MIT until the

rise of Emacs after about 1984.

It tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither

take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and

the default setup provides no indication of which mode the

editor is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he

has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/).

Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the

respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even

some Emacs fans resort to it as a mail editor and for small

editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the

bulkier versions of Emacs).

See holy wars.

(1995-10-03)