is "vi" worth learning in 2022?

From this 'condensed history', ex/vi originated from berkely, which split off from bell latbs/att when unix was made available to universities. Quite what the bell labs guys were using at that time I don't know, but i'm sure they wouldn't have been stuck using ed alone if they could help it. As soon as interactive terminals became available, the demand for a screen editor would have been overwhelming.
carlosbecker.com

A brief and incomplete history of modal text editors | Carlos Becker

In this post I’m going to talk about some old text editors you probably never heard of, what is modal text editing, and why people like it so much.
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blackbird9 said:
I'm quite sure they didn't write all of unix, the C compiler, etc with ed.
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You're sure how? AFAIK they did. The blit terminal came about in 1982 (Rob wrote the jim editor for that). By then unix was already quite well cooked. sam & acme & plan9 came much later.

People forget now that one can and did do their thinking *away* from a computer, at your desk. You then went to a "terminal" room to use the computer, the room shared with other people. That is where you discussed and shared ideas and topics.
 
So before terminals were available, and people were using line printers with keyboards as terminals, then yes, ed would be the way. But once terminals were available, they would have wanted a screen editor. If you look at this video, they're using terminals, of course that was filmed long after the early versions of unix had been written.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

Anyway, I don't know because I wasn't there, but I know that's what I would have wanted.
 
From https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/hist.pdf
One of the comforting things about old memories is their tendency to take on a rosy glow. The programming environment provided by the early versions of Unix seems, when described here, to be extremely harsh and primitive. I am sure that if forced back to the PDP-7 I would find it intolerably limiting and lacking in conveniences. Nevertheless, it did not seem so at the time;
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And this is why vi never took account of caps lock. Bill Joy's ADM-31 terminal back then didn't have a caps-lock key.
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Anyway, this is all ancient history. Vi/ex has been the unix system editor for the last few decades, at least. Certainly since the mid to late 80s. You can fly to any country in the world, sit down at a unix system, and you will have vi available to you. No other screen editors are guaranteed to be available.
 
kpedersen said:
I am sure that once they used i.e vi to write their own text editors, they were complete experts at using it ;)
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They went from ed to *graphical* editors! Bell Labs at the time could afford graphics terminals like the Blit. It was only outside the Labs that people had to make do with cheap imitations of DEC's VT52.
 
bakul said:
They went from ed to *graphical* editors! Bell Labs at the time could afford graphics terminals like the Blit. It was only outside the Labs that people had to make do with cheap imitations of DEC's VT52.
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Sure, there was all kinds of experimentation at the time. Some solutions were adopted for widespread use, others weren't
 
bakul said:
Still, one can do just fine without knowing vi and use ee or emacs or ed or whatever as they are freely available.
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You won't necessarily have ee or emacs or nano, etc available. Vi is the system editor that is guaranteed to be present, its part of the definition of unix. Unless a deliberate decision has been taken to remove it, eg to lock the system down. Vi / ex <<is>> the unix system editor. It's the one that was chosen, decades ago. It is a standard part of the unix userland. None of the others are. Its a standard part of unix, like 'ls', 'cat' and 'grep', etc.
 
bakul said:
They went from ed to *graphical* editors! Bell Labs at the time could afford graphics terminals like the Blit. It was only outside the Labs that people had to make do with cheap imitations of DEC's VT52.
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True, mpx and mux do predate vi. I suppose the later Plan 9's terminals also famously doesn't provide the capabilities required for vi (until an attempt at a vim port many years later), so I suppose that also checks out.

And actually, even Kernighan as an alumni only really used vi "because it was on every system".

Ironically, only the graphical text editors they used are no longer feasible to run these days (sam, acme are not easy to obtain outside of Plan 9 forks. Same with the editors on the Blit terminals). Graphical systems just don't stand the test of time.
 
kpedersen said:
Ironically, only the graphical text editors they used are no longer feasible to run these days (sam, acme are not easy to obtain outside of Plan 9 forks.
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They are, as part of devel/plan9port. I still use acme when browsing through a lot of source files. I used to run acme on my internal machine and access it via a work machine through forwarded ssh tunnels and still acme would start up almost instantly.
 
blackbird9 said:
You won't necessarily have ee or emacs or nano, etc available. Vi is the system editor that is guaranteed to be present, its part of the definition of unix. Unless a deliberate decision has been taken to remove it, eg to lock the system down. Vi / ex <<is>> the unix system editor. It's the one that was chosen, decades ago. It is a standard part of the unix userland. None of the others are. Its a standard part of unix, like 'ls', 'cat' and 'grep', etc.
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The two main reasons to learn to use vi is that it's pretty much guaranteed that any UNIXy system you sit down at will have vi or a clone and 2 that once you get to know how to do a bit with it, it is incredibly efficient in what you can do with just a keyboard.
 
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