[from `Visual Interface'] A screen editor crufted together by Bill
Joy for an early {BSD} release; an interview describing how it came
to be is available. Became the de facto standard Unix editor and a
nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of
{EMACS} after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it
will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa,
and the default setup on older versions provides no indication of
which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that
he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now
a vi clone named vile). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim and
elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991
Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often 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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bring X to its knees}{choke}{EMACS}{holy wars}{live data}]