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The Traditional Vi

51 points

by exvi

7 hours ago

| past

| 10 comments

| ex-vi.sourceforge.net

| HN

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JdeBP

3 hours ago

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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.

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whartung

28 minutes ago

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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.

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imglorp

2 hours ago

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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..

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GaryBluto

5 hours ago

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

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voidUpdate

2 hours ago

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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

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himata4113

5 hours ago

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

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deadbabe

2 hours ago

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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.

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lunar_rover

44 minutes ago

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

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himata4113

2 hours ago

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Not a feature on a 32inch ultrawide.

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deadbabe

2 hours ago

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Use smaller window

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zamadatix

42 minutes ago

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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.

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christophilus

5 hours ago

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

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Gualdrapo

4 hours ago

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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

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nosioptar

4 hours ago

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Breaks Firefox's reader mode.

Looks like dog shit on mobile.

I agree that this general style is good, just without some of this page's fuckups.

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kps

3 hours ago

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

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heftig

3 hours ago

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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.

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chorizo

3 hours ago

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

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senthil_rajasek

4 hours ago

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

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

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herodoturtle

3 hours ago

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

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wyclif

1 hour ago

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It's still very much alive.

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mghackerlady

3 hours ago

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

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sombragris

1 hour ago

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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.

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JdeBP

3 hours ago

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See infobox.

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

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jbverschoor

3 hours ago

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vim with mouse frustrates the hell out of me.

Just give me basic vi, or a complete editor