I was looking for a tiny editor which can be easily adapted and embedded into a (Forth) system. The vi EMACS war is over but others have won. However for me vi is better suited for restricted (embedded) systems. I have not used vi for a very long time, but to see a screen full with ~ at the beginning of the lines makes me feel like coming home. I never thought I would ever take the book Learning the vi Editor, by Linda Lamb, 5th edition 1990 off the bookshelf again for reading. I kept the book only for sentimental reasons.
My editor history:
This vi has its origin in BusyBox tiny vi. But there are some differences:
The program is resident. The text buffer and other buffers too. You can leave the program without saving, do some work on the command line and go back to vi and continue the edit task.
The text buffer is restricted to 40 KiB. Large files have to be split up.
8-bit characters are allowed e.g. UTF8
Mecrisp Forth uses DOS/Windows style line endings carriage return and line feed ("\r\n"). Unix (and vi) uses just line feed ("\n"). https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/File_format dos2unix unix2dos
The command v evaluates a line.
Don't forget: you can't use any special keys (e.g. cursor movement keys) in the insert/replace mode.