I started writing a more fleshed out vi compatibility mode for TextAdept earlier this year. As someone who understood the basics after going through :vimtutor multiple times but always struggled with the more "advanced" commands, there's no better way to actually grok vi than to just try to recreate it. It's pretty amazing how much Bill Joy managed to pack in. Of course, if you're implementing POSIX vi, there are quite a few features that have aged poorly, like roff/troff macros and line-editing, but there are also quite a few commands that I had never paid attention to (like _) that have subtle behaviors that sped up my editing even more. The hardest part about becoming proficient in vi is committing commands to muscle memory so you don't habitually fall back on hjkl.

I was just talking about a fun and largely forgotten feature of Joy+Horton vi elsewhere.

* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116793159030149624

You can see it here in Ritter vi on lines 83 et seq. of ex_vis.h . vi actually has three flavours of its 'open' mode, for cursor addressable video terminals, non-cursor addressable video terminals, and actual paper terminals.

There's an as-yet unfilled niche for the retrocomputeristas with genuine ADM-3s or (as someone pointed out) TI Silent 703s and suchlike to do a YouTube video showing Joy+Horton vi in its 3 open modes.

As an undergrad around 1984 I stumbled on some AT&T 3B2's in the computer lab and started to play. Knowing nothing of Unix (would have been ~ SVR3.x), I asked for help and the TA said something like "read the fine manual" as was customary. So I started off with "man something" and off we went, ending up at "man 1 vi", the glorious, pure original, none of this vim stuff...

Of course when I got onto the BSD VAX, someone set me straight and it was Emacs from there on..

I learned vi back in the day and have never really graduated to vim.

My favorite features are the ranges on the commands (like substitute or delete), piping the buffer into the bottomless utility of the classic UNIX command line, and the . do again command.

About the only vim feature I use today is being able to navigate while entering text, but even after all this time, that is not automatic to me.

I have used syntax coloring a couple of times, I find it particularly useful for XML, especially XML with chunks of XML commented out.

Tangentially related, I wish more websites and blogs looked like this now. It's elegant and modern but simple.

I wish it took up more than 640 pixels on the left of my 1920 pixel screen. I changed the CSS of the body to be 900pt instead of 480, and it renders at 1200px wide, which looks a lot nicer to my eyes. Didn't bother trying to center it though, which would have improved it even more

Lacks centering, other than that I also found it enjoyable to look at.

That’s a feature. It lets your thumb scroll comfortably in a larger blank area so the content is always in view for you. There is no reason for things to be centered, it does not aid readability.

This only works on large enough tablets. On phones the page isn't readable without a 3x zoom.

Not a feature on a 32inch ultrawide.

Use phone horizontally.

Much more practically, the best designs are the ones who don't demand of the user they be consumed in a single form across every scenario.

To me, the justified text makes it an effortful read.

Yup, I hope every one agrees to leave proper justified text to LaTeX/ConTeXt/Typst/<your_favorite_typesetting_software>, doing such thing for HTML is still ugly and makes things harder to read

Chrome's too, but why? It's just plain HTML.

Mobile browsers are assuming you're looking at a legacy page optimized for desktops (widescreen) and have a relatively large virtual screen size by default. They expect you to manually zoom in as necessary. Adding this helps:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=640, initial-scale=1">

This matches the max-width specified by the CSS. However, a smaller viewport width might be appropriate to increase the text size on mobile.

Safari reader mode on mobile works great. But then again, this is a site where you should not need it.

A 2007 article from sourceforge.net and it's not even throwback Thursday.

"Gunnar Ritter <gunnarr@acm.org> 2007-11-29"

It's been years since I heard the term "Throwback Thursday", funny that reading it here felt like a throwback in its own right ^_^

It's still very much alive.

I wish elvis was still around. I don't want everything vim has but I like syntax highlighting and other conveniences

Is still around, at least for some values of "around".

Elvis, at its latest release (2.2.0) is a required part of Slackware, part of the A (essential system) package series. I have it installed on my system, alongside Plasma 6.7 and kernel 7.1.

See infobox.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/vi-family.html#elvis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132452)

vim with mouse frustrates the hell out of me.

Just give me basic vi, or a complete editor

`set compatible`?

Github mirror + some bugfixes

https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/

:x is a vim feature, so this wouldn't support it, so you'll have to use :wq instead.

Incorrect.

:x is a vi feature, that was introduced by Mary Ann Horton to actual Joy+Horton vi in February 1980.

* https://code.illumos.org/plugins/gitiles/illumos-gate/+/refs...

Ritter's vi is derived from Joy+Horton vi. Illumos has the original.

or ZZ to save and exit

Repeat ZZ to save & exit if there are more files to edit

ZQ - discard & exit

28 years of vi and TIL about ZZ.

Thanks friend! ^_^

ZZ is the first vi command I learned. After typing vi and only seeing a column of ~s, I asked how do I get out of this thing. Someone answered - ZZ.

Did they say "zz" or specify [capital] "ZZ"?

I just learnt it the other day, as well. Granted, it was from chapter 1 of "Learning the vi and vim Text Editors" but shhh

text editors 5ever