is "vi" worth learning in 2022?

kpedersen said:
People will be saying the same in spaceyear 3049.

It will still outlive whatever text editor is called "modern" today. I can even see this thread outliving a lot of today's text editors.
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Fortunately there's no realistic situation that actually requires it except people working on a 80x25 hardware terminal. Anything with curses can do better.
 
For the record - there are more people today making stone tips for arrows than there were in the actual stone age.
Be careful about what is obsolete or will be on the decline, no matter what it is.
 
I would never use any Unix system that didn't have vi on it. It's a bare minimum and necessary editor that everyone I know, from my company hires to SGI and Pixar and more, uses on a daily basis for dealing with system related things.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I would never use any Unix system that didn't have vi on it. It's a bare minimum and necessary editor that everyone I know, from my company hires to SGI and Pixar and more, uses on a daily basis for dealing with system related things.
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It would be because vi is in POSIX spec.

So still worth learning even on 2026 (at least how exit from it sanely), as vi is the only "screen editor" listed in Utilities part of Shell & Utilities volume.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I would never use any Unix system that didn't have vi on it.
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Ya - that's a deal breaker for me as well.

A lot of Unix/Linux/etc systems don't have X windows or any kind of GUI installed on them - those systems are "bare bones" and running different configurations. So you should plan to use a Unix/Linux standard editor like vi(1) at a minimum.

vi(1) might be really old... but it's (ALWAYS) installed and available and really that's what matters.
 
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