Back then, on balance yes. I've used Joy+Horton #vi (and #STEVIE, and #nvi) and original Notepad. The former on a 300 BPS terminal largely outdid Notepad on an old CGA IBM PC.
But better graphics hardware and a PS/2 keyboard improve Notepad, whereas Joy+Horton vi would still even today be doing things like displaying just an '@' symbol when a line was too long, or not updating following text during an insert operation, or just not accepting cursor keys.
People tend to have forgotten how much we got, like multi-level undo/redo, line wrap truncation, editing during insert, and even a help system, with the clones.
Yes. I was mentioning this to @cks the other day.
https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/116030855863806427
I think that it came out in the early 1990s. The copyright dates in the source uniformly say 1983, which would make OpenWatcom vi the earliest vi clone on record (pre-dating #STEVIE by 4 years).
However, they say this uniformly, even for its OS/2 and Windows NT parts, which couldn't have existed in 1983. And 1983 pre-dates even Waterloo C. So I suspect some Sybase lawyer has lied in these copyright declarations.
Watcom had a non-vi multi-window and menus TUI editor for DOS named wbed.exe at one point.
@[email protected] It's not even a hot take. It's actual history. STEVIE came from the days when people were re-inventing Joy vi for other platforms and systems with (gasp!) arrow keys and console-paradigm I/O. It was less than a decade until people were thinking that Joy vi could be improved and were actively trying to make things that were better. Watcom vi, for another example, came out in the early 1990s and that had windows, and uses for function keys. #vi #STEVIE #vim #OpenWatcom
On #Illumos, Joy vi is in /usr/src/cmd/vi:
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/cmd/vi
On #OpenBSD, Bostic #nvi is in /usr/src/usr.bin/vi/vi; #NetBSD having it in /usr/src/external/bsd/nvi; and #FreeBSD in /usr/src/contrib/nvi:
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/contrib/nvi/
FreeBSD has an nvi2 in ports:
https://freshports.org/editors/nvi2/
OpenBSD has elvis in ports:
https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/editors/elvis/pkg/DESCR
Ritter's Heirloom vi is on SourceForge:
STEVIE was posted to comp.sources.unix in 1988:
https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume15/stevie/
Unfortunately, Sven Guckes's vi Clones WWW site was never completed with some of this, notably lacking Heirloom vi, for example.
https://guckes.net/vi/clones.html
But it does mention oft-overlooked commercial clones such as Watcom's vi, a from-scratch implementation started in 1983 that is also now source-available:
https://github.com/open-watcom/owp4v1copy/tree/master/bld/vi
#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #STEVIE #elvis #VIM #NeoVIM #Watcom #OpenWatcom
manuti
JdeBP