What is considered to be vi?

Question

/bin/vi, as written by Bill Joy in the '70's is vi. And /usr/bin/vim, as written by Bram in the '90's, is vim.

But we also have neovim now, nvi (mostly the same as Joy's vi, except when it's not), elvis (also a clone with more features), vile ("Emacs like vi", a Vi-mode for Emacs), Vim-in-VSCode, and many more.

And there are also a great many programs that are "vi-inspired", such as music players, web browsers, spreadsheets, etc. which all resemble the vi or Vim user interface. Is this still vi?

Answer 1

I propose the following criteria:

• Its main purpose is a text-editor; anything else that has the vi user interface paradigm (so far as one exists) is far too broad a scope.
• It must be mostly compatible with the original vi for all basic operations; where mostly is not precisely defined to allow flexibility in considering individual cases. The vi posix standard is probably a good rule-of-thumb.
• It need not be a stand-alone program; a plugin for Visual Studio that gives vi-like behavior is on-topic, but only the vi-like behavior is.

If you want to know why Visual Studio is giving some weird error message when you try to save a file, that's for Stack Overflow or Super User. If you want to know the keys to hit to quickly change all the occurrences of "foo" to "bar" in the brace-delimited block your cursor is in, that's on-topic.

I feel this will become even more important if NeoVim succeeds in making an easily-embeddable vim. Then there will be far more fully vi-like environments which are not stand-alone.

Answer 2

As a commenter mentioned, I asked a similar question on Area 51 when this site was a proposal.

• I feel that if the program uses vi bindings natively (not through a plugin), then it should be accepted.
• If there is a vim-inspired browser, it should be on topic with a special tag of its own.
• Plugins for vi are on topic, as they provide additional features to the editor, but (in most ways) express those features in a vi-like manner. (Key bindings, .vimrc settings)
• It is important to only discuss programs with stable or, the very least, beta versions present. Such versions are open to a wider audience and allows more people the chance to contribute their answer to help. Furthermore, why discuss a program with features that aren't definite, or with substantial bugs still?
• The following programs, I feel are on topic (see below for explanation): vi, Vim, vile, elvis, and nvi.

---

I know a lot of people regard O'Reilly as the source for computer knowledge. (I know that's how it was in my house when growing up.) I proposed that the following editors be considered on-topic, following suit with O'Reilly's Vi/Vim Pocket Guide. As mentioned on the book's back cover:

Author Arnold Robbins has chosen ... vi, Vim, and vi's main clones -- vile, elvis, and nvi"

Interestingly enough, the pocket guide also includes ex. I also just looked up the full O'Reilly guide on Amazon. In the product description, it "solves" the question about gvim:

How to make full use of the GUI version of vim, called gvim

Answer 3

I lean (to a fault, perhaps) toward broad scoping and inclusiveness. My philosophy (which I have spontaneously developed in the last 30 seconds without putting any serious thought into it) is that vi is not just a(n ancient) editor; it's also a keyboard-based modal user interface. (That is, vi invented/introduced/popularized all the ohello<Esc>0~A!<Esc>/emacs<CR>:%s//vi/g nonsense that we've all come to know and love, and this, rather than text editing as such, is vi's real legacy.)

My intuition on this "philosophy on the legacy of vi" is based on the application of this user interface to non-text-editing contexts, such as window-managers (e.g. in i3) or web browsers (e.g. using vimium).

This is not to say that any and all questions pertaining to a vi-like user interface would necessarily be on-topic. For instance, I can't really think of any questions I would consider on-topic for i3, since the vi-like elements are pretty minimal. ("How do I remap the directional keys in i3", for instance, would definitely not be on-topic, since the i3 configuration is entirely i3-specific.)

So my personal criteria for whether or not a question is on-topic would be:

• If it's about vi itself, it's on-topic.
• If it's about a vi clone, i.e. a vi-like text editor (including all of the ones mentioned above), it's on-topic.
• If it's about an extension for one of the above--e.g. a Vim plugin--it's on-topic.
• If it's about a program (such as bvi) that is not strictly a text-editor but whose user interface is designed to closely match that of vi, it's on-topic. (Note that i3 uses elements of vi's user interface, but in general its user interface is very different.)
• If the question is about a user-interface that is specifically designed to emulate vi--e.g., the user interface for vimium--then it's on topic. This is unfortunately a bit of a mushy criterion. I'm not sure, for instance, whether the question "how does vimium assign letters when pressing <Esc>f" would be considered on-topic, since, as far as I can tell, that feature isn't really inspired by anything in vi. (Though I suppose the question "Is there a feature in vi/vim that corresponds to Vimium's <Esc>f behavior" would probably be on-topic, since it's asking about vi directly.)

EDIT: Note that my last criterion does NOT imply that any and all questions about programs that include some vi-like UI elements are on topic--only questions about the vi-like UI elements themselves would be on topic.

Answer 4

So, the 'Vi and Vim' Exchange should be about:

• vim/neovim-class Editor
• • neovim
• • vimium
• • JetBrain IntelliIDEA platforms (pycharm, webstorm)
• • elvis
• • vile
• vimscript or Scripting
• • vim-lua
• • vim-python
• • vim-haskell
• plugins (or extensibility)
• • (many tags here)
• • LLM-related
• • • lua
• • • treesitter
• Keymapping (for vi/vim-class editors)
• OS-specific platforms (for vi/vim-class editors)