is "vi" worth learning in 2022?

I always go back to vi, but I prefer vim to vi and have to make an alias for it.

Other editors I discard if they don't have a vi mode.

The vim tip of the day: Use ":x" instead of ":wq". Life's too short to type that many characters!
 
T-Aoki said:
One thing to mention would be that anyone coming from Windows would hit F1 key instead of typing "help".:(
Old NEC PC-9801 users would look for "HELP" key on their keyboard, which would never exists nowadays.;) Yes, there was a dedicated key.
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Windows? HA! F1 for help comes from IBM CUA, designed by a guy called Dave Roberts, I know because I worked with him for a while. That was the old, good IBM that did real human factors engineering, like what they did on the older thinkpads and things like the model M keyboard and even the PC itself. OS/2 PM was fully CUA compliant and had a great user interface as a result; but windows only kept some parts of the architecture (like F1), and they seem to have moved further away as time goes on, and their usability has suffered as a result. I really dislike the way the modern windows desktop has become nowadays; awful rubbish.

IBM Common User Access - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
T-Aoki said:
Yes, it's quite easy to learn, if any coach/mentor stands by the person who first invoking vi without any knowledge about vi. Without preliminary knowkedge or coach, it is surely almost IMPOSSIBLE.
Once more. vi is an excellent editor FOR STEPPING UP TO EXPERTS/WIZARDS. But not for the first step for newbies coming from Windows or something.
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I really don't agree with that! I taught myself pretty much everything about vi, mainly from books plus a couple of tutorials, before the public internet or linux were even things. That was on a VAX with VT100 terminals at the beginning, running DEC unix (they called it "ULTRIX", ugh) and the later on Suns. I guess I did have a bit of previous experience with 'ed' on a PDP 8 before that, which was so ancient they didn't even have vi on it.

I didn't have any mentors, although I always used to swap tips with friends, still do. There was a really good book at the time from one of the US publishers (possibly Sams, but I'm not sure) with a dark blue cover that was all about the unix user tools, including vi; I can't remember the title, that was back in the 80s. And the chapter on vi in the oreilly "unix power tools" book is still very good and well worth reading. In fact the whole "power tools" book is excellent. You certainly CAN teach yourself to use vi, it's just not that hard! Why do you guys think it's so difficult?! Certainly not impossible!

Nowadays there's a vast collection of web tutorials out there, and of course many books specifically on vim including Bram's own user manual. A quick search on amazon finds tons of them. So I don't agree. It's really not very difficult. Once you've learnt the basics you can then learn a lot from the help pages and by experiment, and you learn incrementally by using it.

I can't find that old 80s book I remember online, but the oreilly book is a classic and well worth buying, for any beginners reading this. See here:- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-power-tools/0596003307/

I don't really know how to say this, but I thought I would find a bunch of vi and emacs FANATICS on the freebsd forums (of all places), not people who say vi is impossible to learn. 😄 There's always the unix hater's handbook of course! https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf 😄
 
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blackbird9 said:
Windows? HA! F1 for help comes from IBM CUA, designed by a guy called Dave Roberts, I know because I worked with him for a while. That was the old, good IBM that did real human factors engineering, like what they did on the older thinkpads and things like the model M keyboard and even the PC itself. OS/2 PM was fully CUA compliant and had a great user interface as a result; but windows only kept some parts of the architecture (like F1), and they seem to have moved further away as time goes on, and their usability has suffered as a result. I really dislike the way the modern windows desktop has become nowadays; awful rubbish.

IBM Common User Access - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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I know CUA because I was using OS/2 before switching to FreeBSD as of discontinuation by IBM.
Why I picked Windows here is just because it's still widely sold (newly licensed to consumers). There's a successor of OS/2 but it's not from IBM themselves.
 
blackbird9 said:
What is so good is that that paper is STILL VALID, you could use that paper to teach yourself the basics of vi even now. Once you've learned it, the skills last you for decades :cool:
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Weirdly I have never come across this one. Very nice, thanks!

One that I always find fun to read is the pdf of Watcom Vi. Obviously a considerably different vi to (n)vi but it is still great to be reminded of the days when Vi was so darn sought after that a company would spend resources cloning it and then marketing it commercially. The Watcom C (wcl), Debugger (wdb) and Vi stack was so good on DOS.
 
Eric A. Borisch said:
#1 reason: it’s always there. Working on some embedded *nix? It’s there. Repairing a system? It’s in /rescue.

Do you need to master it, or use it as your main editor, no. Should you know how to use it enough to move around in a file, change something, and save? Yes.
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That is exactly what I thought - for an average user, one need only a limited set of commands - find, replace, go-to line, delete, undo, and few other commands (including :q! and ZZ). That is not much to learn. Personally I have been using vi since the end of 1980-s (that means almost 40 years). It has always been there and I assume that it will last another 40 years. So, IMHO, it is worth to learn these few commands even today.
 
Bill Joy's original paper is only 20 pages long, and its still a really good tutorial introduction to vi if you read it through. It's really not that complicated an editor, certainly to learn the essentials.

The MKS unix toolkit too, for windows and OS/2 (and I think it may have been available for MS-DOS, can't remember), was and still is another similar package to the watcom.

And the Mark Williams company's COHERENT unix clone operating system for the PC came with a great big thick book that was another great way to learn unix, along with their software as well of course. I think I've still got my hard copy of that book buried away somewhere. Check it out:-


Actually after looking through that I remembered they shipped coherent with micro-emacs, not vi; maybe they didn't have a port of vi at the time. But that book is very good for many other parts of unix. They even cover lexx and yacc.
 
bakul said:
I would have to disagree (even though I have primarily used vi for decades). Any powerful editor would do and for others you just have to know how to exit them!
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Yes, any powerful editor would do, but you are not always in that position being able to install your editor of choice. Sometimes you've got to live with what's being preinstalled, and for most unix like OSes this is vi aside ed and nothing else. Heck, ed sometimes is just a vi-ish editor behaving like ed nowadays. Vi is the lingua franca of editors.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
smithi And I say again. If one considers figuring out that :q quits out of vi and it's too difficult to learn then they should stick to their Game boxes and leave us alone.
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A sort of "you must be this tall to get on this ride" for Freebsd?

12036690-672x900.jpg
 
Back in the day the choice was vi and emacs. vi was installed right from the factory on all new systems. emacs required either a pkgadd (in Solaris) or download gcc (or egcs back then) and a bunch of other tools to build emacs from source.

In those days I managed a lot of Solaris and other servers, including FreeBSD. Eventually the team morphed from just me to a team, which I managed. It was a PITA to install on every new server so we learned vi.

Today at $JOB, the Linux systems all come with nano. FreeBSD comes with ee (that's aee lite). Personally, I still use vi (or vim), sometimes emacs. But most of the team at $JOB use nano. Nobody learns vi anymore.

On the flip side, I think it's still a good skill to have. Not every machine will have nano or ee on it. And personally, I can edit more efficiently with vi than most others with nano. Once a person learns how to use vi you'll probably never go back to nano or any graphical editor.

It's your choice.
 
cy@ said:
On the flip side, I think it's still a good skill to have. Not every machine will have nano or ee on it. And personally, I can edit more efficiently with vi than most others with nano. Once a person learns how to use vi you'll probably never go back to nano or any graphical editor.
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That is an important point - vi is efficient. For example, if one needs to search a simple sting, /<string><ENTER> is the fastest possible way to do it. It cannot be made any faster, any other searches require some extra effort.
 
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