2026-02-12 06:41 UTC
@JdeBP@mastodonapp.uk @cks@mastodon.social owvi is an interesting one, housing a vi inside a Turbo-style TUI. While the multi-window stuff is really nice (for a TUI), the vi implementation itself is different and the finger feel needs adjustment. nvi has a couple of active clones: nvi2 and openvi. busybox has a minimal vi implementation. there is also xvi which was derived from STEVIE and seems to be semi-active. Ritter's vi is still maintained by n-t-roff on github though the freebsd port seems to refer to the old ex-vi upstream.
https://github.com/lichray/nvi2
https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi
https://github.com/martinwguy/xvi
https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi
Replies (1)
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@JdeBP__dup_33984@mastodonapp.uk 2026-02-12 09:09
@kaveman@mastodon.bsd.cafe Yes. I was mentioning this to @cks@mastodon.social the other day. https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/116030855863806427 I think that it came out in the early 1990s. The copyright dates in the source uniformly say 1983, which would make OpenWatcom vi the earliest vi clone on record (pre-dating #STEVIE by 4 years). However, they say this uniformly, even for its OS/2 and Windows NT parts, which couldn't have existed in 1983. And 1983 pre-dates even Waterloo C. So I suspect some Sybase lawyer has lied in these copyright declarations. Watcom had a non-vi multi-window and menus TUI editor for DOS named wbed.exe at one point. #Watcom #OpenWatcom #vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory