@kaveman

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.

#Watcom #OpenWatcom #vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

@gumnos

I mentioned Guckes's list not having Heirloom vi in that other thread.

I haven't thought about these in years, and they are an understandable additional blind spot in Guckes's list; but the MKS Toolkit had a vi, as did Interix.

https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/vi.1.asp

The :open test indicates that vi in the MKS Toolkit was actual Joy+Horton vi.

#Interix (at least according to an old Scott Mueller book) had both vi and nvi, so I wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to have been Bostic #nvi by two names.

As I recall, Central Point PC Tools, the Norton Utilities, and the Graham Utilities had text editors of varying degrees but did not have vi.

@cks
#vi #ComputerHistory #retrocomputing

@cks

OpenWatcom vi is source available.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116052015020764901

Ritter's Heirloom #vi is in #FreeBSD ports today, coming from the same place that it has for a long time.

https://freshports.org/editors/2bsd-vi/

It was dropped from #ArchLinux because it did not compile and hadn't changed in 20 years. Ironically, this is because the (GNU) C language had changed, and it has to nowadays be compiled forcing an older GNU C language version.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2285124#p2285124

Several people have independently discovered the Makefile patch that gets it to build on #Debian and the like.

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=629775

https://gist.github.com/cwfoo/01abac5c39f398b7e7b16a2b87aa518b

#elvis, the precursor to #nvi, is packaged for both #NetBSD/ #pkgsrc and #OpenBSD.

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/editors/elvis/index.html

https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/editors/elvis

#retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #Watcom #OpenWatcom

@davefischer

I'm guessing that that was Ritter's Heirloom vi.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116052015020764901

There are discussions in an Arch Linux forum of its package being removed because it hadn't changed in two decades and the (GNU flavoured) C language had.

It's in the #FreeBSD ports collection; and several people have independently come up with the Makefile patch that gets it to build on Debian Linux.

https://freshports.org/editors/2bsd-vi/

#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #gcc #ArchLinux

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:

https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net

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