vi Editor

I have not used vi for a very long time. The vi EMACS war is over but others have won. I was looking for a tiny editor which can be easily adapted and embedded into a (Forth) system. But for me vi is better suited for restricted (embedded) systems.

To see a screen full with ~ at the beginning of the lines makes me happy.

This vi has its origin from 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.
• 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.

My editor history:

• CP/M Turbo Pascal Editor (Wordstar) OKI if800, Z80 Assembler, Pascal, 1984
• UNIX Rand Editor, Perkin Elmer, 1985
• VMS EDT MicroVAX, Pascal, Oracle DB, 1987
• vi (MKS Toolkit) IBM PC DOS cross-assembler for NEC's 75X 4-bit MCUs, Coherent OS, Linux, 1988
• UNIX EMACS as system administrator for DEC Tru64 UNIX, SUN Solaris, and Linux servers, 1996
• IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans, EWARM), 2010

BusyBox and ToyBox

• https://git.busybox.net/busybox/plain/editors/vi.c
• Toybox
• https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/toys/pending/vi.c

Documentation, Manual

• Busybox vi tutorial https://k.japko.eu/busybox-vi-tutorial.html
• Learning the vi Editor/BusyBox vi https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_Editor/BusyBox_vi
• Unix/Linux - The vi Editor Tutorial https://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix/unix-vi-editor.htm
• vi Editor "Cheat Sheet" http://www.atmos.albany.edu/daes/atmclasses/atm350/vi_cheat_sheet.pdf
• The Vi Lovers Home Page ... this makes a great starting point. https://thomer.com/vi/vi.html

-- Peter Schmid - 2020-08-29

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