Visual Interface
<tool, text> (vi) /V-I/, /vi:/, *never* /siks/ A screen editor crufted together by
Bill Joy for an early
BSD release.
vi became the de facto standard
Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favourite outside of
MIT until the rise of
Emacs after about 1984.
It tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991
Usenet poll preferred it), and even some Emacs fans resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of Emacs).
See
holy wars.
