Mastodawn

So my experiments with nvi (on my macOS lapotop) today so far:
- `brew install nvi` superfically works, but display is borked for /thorn þ and /eth ð
- found Keith Bostic nvi source, but couldn't work out how to compile it
- found https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git but the UK government prevents my from seeing it
- found https://github.com/lichray/nvi2 and _that_ compiled ok after i brew install'd cmake and ninja and appears to display ok.

Separately to those, i had to remove 1 vim-ism that had crept into my $EXINIT in the last 30 years or so.

So maybe i will get Jia Tan'd or milkshake duck'd, but ok so far.

#nvi

Public Git Hosting - nvi.git/summary

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r1w1s1 Mar 7

Yeah, elvis is basically dead on UTF-8. nvi is the right call, though worth noting it originated from Keith Bostic at Berkeley, OpenBSD just maintains a fork of it. Slackware's package is well maintained, Patrick has been keeping a solid patchset going: 41 patches from Debian covering correctness fixes, LFS, regex, GCC compatibility and so on, plus upstream fixes from Sven Verdoolaege's git tree. I've been maintaining my own local build on top of that with 4 more upstream patches, a buffer overflow fix in ex_comm_search, an invalid access in filename expansion and two memory leak fixes in ex_aci and screen_end.

That said I've been also playing with neatvi lately. It has native UTF-8 support baked in from the ground up, bidirectional text, combining characters, everything. Worth a look if UTF-8 is your main concern.

#slackware #nvi #vim

r1w1s1 Mar 6

Kernel upgraded to Linux 6.19.6 on Slackware.
System stable so far... Rachael Tyrell from Blade Runner keeping an eye on things.

#slackware #kernel #dwm #st #slackfetch #nvi #neatvi

r1w1s1 Mar 6

Just measured memory usage of nvi vs neatvi opening a ~500KB file (/usr/include/*.h concatenated):

nvi 5184 KB
neatvi 1960 KB
2.6x less RSS neatvi wins without syntax highlighting even in the picture. The difference is likely nvi's Berkeley DB recovery layer allocating upfront regardless of use.

#vi #neatvi #nvi #unix #suckless #linux #slackware

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JdeBP Feb 20

@ratsnakegames

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.

One thing I noticed about #nvi as opposed to #vim. #nvi is able to edit very large text files, were #vim can take a much longer time to load that file for edit. That is because it seems #vim reads the full file into memory, were #nvi seems to reads portions into memory.

But to be fair, no one in their right mind would edit a file as large as I am referring to :) But I have done it a couple of times due to database loads at work.

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r1w1s1 Feb 20

I gradually stopped using Vim and now use nvi exclusively. I even wrote a small quick reference for it:

http://www.slackware.com/~r1w1s1/nvi.html

CC: @[email protected]

#slackware #nvi

nvi Quick Reference

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r1w1s1 Feb 16

nice! For nvi users, no patch needed just add to your shell profile:

export EXINIT='source ~/.config/nvi/nexrc'

EXINIT is the standard ex/vi init variable, works across nvi and traditional vi implementations.

Just make sure ~/.nexrc and ~/.exrc don't exist, otherwise nvi reads those first and ignores EXINIT. #Vim #nvi #XDG

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JdeBP Feb 12

@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

ex, vi, view -- display-oriented interactive text editor

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JdeBP Feb 12

@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