[TUHS] diving into vi (nvi) - some observations from a slow learner

[Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>]

Well, I really dove into using vi by way of nvi this past week and I 
have to say... the water's fine. It turns out that vi is a much simpler 
editor to understand and use (but no less powerful) than it's great 
grandchild, vim. To be fair, vim is an interesting editor and having 
used it off and on since the mid '90s, it's very familiar... but its 
powers? difficult to attain.

vim stands as an excellent example of just how far you can take a 
product that works, keeping its core, but expanding it in all 
directions. No matter how much I tried to grasp its essence, it alluded 
me. The online help files seemed inscrutable to me, mixing environment 
settings, ex commands, ex mode commands, vi motions, insert mode 
commands in ways that seemed quite confusing to me. I know that I'm 
probably among a select few vim users that love it without really having 
a clue as to how it works. My best resource has been the web and search, 
but of late I've been wanting more. That's what drove me on this quest 
to really dig in to how things used to work and nvi is the best 
surrogate of the old ways that I could find (well, excluding heirloom 
vi, the traditional vi, which I've confirmed works pretty much the same 
way as nvi, with lisp support and without a few nice-to-haves nvi has).

Anyway, here's something I worked out, after much travail - vi appears 
to be all about modes, movement, counts, operators, registers, and 
screens (which I found very weird at first, but simple in retrospect)... 
with these fundamentals down, it seems like you can do anything and I 
mean anything... and all of the other functions are just bolted on for 
the purpose of making their specific tasks work.

Getting this out of the existing documentation was a mess. Thankfully 
the nvi docs (based on the 4.4 docs) are much slimmer and better 
organized. Even so, they make assumptions of the reader that I don't 
seem to fit. Take motions as prolly the most glaring example - all of 
the docs I've ever seen organize these by logical units of text (words, 
paras, etc), personally and apparently persistently, I think of motion 
as directed, so it took me a lot of experimentation, head scratching, 
and writing things out several times in several different ways to 
realize I could represent the idea on a single notecard as (some 
commands appear in multiple lines):

Leftward motions - [[, {, (, 0, ^|_, B, b, h|^H
Rightward Movement - l|SP, e, E, w, W, $, ), }, ]]
Upward motions - 1G, ^B, H, ^U, -, k | ^P
Downward motions - G, ^F, L, ^D, ^M | +, j | ^J | ^N
Absolute - | G
Relative - %, H, M, L
Marks - m, ', `, '', ``

Keeping in mind that movements left-to-right are - section, para, 
sentence, line, text, word and endword (big, and small), and letter. And 
up and down are - file, screen, in screen (HML), half-screen, 
chars-in-line, and line. For me, this inversion from units of motion to 
direction of motion put forty some-odd commands in much closer reach for 
me. Looking back at the vim documentation, I see how its sheer volume 
and the way it is organized got in the way of my seeing the forest.

Thankfully, in nvi, there are two incredibly useful ex commands to help 
- exu[sage] and viu[sage]. I simply printed these out and worked with 
them making the experimental assumption that they would serve as a 
baseline that represented the full capabilities of vi... and sure 
enough, after working and working with them, I am pretty confident they 
are sufficient for any editing task.  Wow, who knew? I loved vi, but 
now, I'm starting to really appreciate it's simplicity?! I can't believe 
those words are coming out of my mouth. I never thought of it as 
simple... those movement commands were far too numerous as I understood 
them.

Are there things I miss from vim? Sure, I miss command line completion 
in ex mode, I want my help text to appear in a window where I can 
search, I would like better window control. But, I think I'll stick with 
nvi a while until I really nail it down. Then all of the cool stuff that 
vim offers, or neovim, will seem like icing on the cake that is vi.

Thanks to Ken Thompson for writing a work of art that serves as the true 
core of this editor,  to Bill Joy for his great work in extending it, 
again to Bill Joy for bringing vi to life, and to Mary Ann for the 
macros and making it accessible to the rest of us, and others who 
contributed. It's 2024 and I still can't find a better terminal editor 
than vi... as it existed in the late '80s or as it exists today as 
nvi/vim/neovim. Amazing piece of software.

Off to figure out tags!! Arg, seems like it oughtta be really useful in 
my work with source code, why can't I figure it out?! Sheesh.

Will