forked from TildeClub/site
78 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
78 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: The Vi Editor
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category: software
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author:
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- ant
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---
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*Tilde.Club* has
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[The Traditional Vi](https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/)
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installed on its premises.
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It is not just another
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[Vi clone](https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ViFamily),
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but the direct continuation
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of Bill Joy's legendary work at Berkeley.
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The binaries are in `/usr/archaic/bin/`
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and the man pages
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(separately for `ex` and `vi`)
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in `/usr/archaic/share/man/man/`.
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You can invoke *The Traditional Vi* in several ways
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(in the order of increased engagement):
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1. by the full path to the executable:
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/usr/archaic/bin/vi
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2. by adding it as an alias to your shell's `rc` file
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(`~/.bashrc` for *Bash*), e.g:
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alias tvi=/usr/archaic/bin/vi
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and then invokng *Vi* by typing `tvi`,
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3. by adding the locations *Vi* and its documentation
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in front of the `PATH` and `MANPATH` environment variables
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in your shell's profile script
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(for *Bash*, `~/.bash_profile` or `~/.profile`):
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export PATH="/usr/archaic/bin/:$PATH"
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export MANPATH="/usr/archaic/share/man/man:$MANPATH"
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The latter method has the advantage
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of affecting subshells,
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so that if you specify `vi` as the default editor
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in your e-mail or news client, or another CLI program,
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it will invoke *The Traditional Vi*,
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ditto for your shell scripts
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and the `EDITOR` environment variale.
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## Resources
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1. Bill Joy's
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[An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi ](https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/viin/paper.html),
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2. [`vi(1)`](https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/vi.html) man page,
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3. [`ex(1)`](https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ex.html) man page,
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4. [A concise `vi` reference](http://www.ungerhu.com/jxh/vi.html),
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5. [The Ultimate guide to the VI and EX text editors](https://archive.org/details/ultimateguidetov0000unse_i5e4) (a paper book),
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6. The `#vi` channel on the
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[Libera.Chat](https://libera.chat/)
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IRC network,
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dedicated to the original *Vi*
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and all its variants except *Vim* & co,
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7. [VI experience in the shell](https://deut-erium.github.io/2024/01/28/inputrc.html).
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## Building
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*The Traditional Vi* is surprisingly easy to build from
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[its source](https://sourceforge.net/p/ex-vi/code/).
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You only need to locate the following line in `Makefile`:
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TERMLIB = termlib
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and replace the value with `curses` or `ncurses`,
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depending on your preferred terminal library.
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Now you can build and install the project with:
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make && make install
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