OpenVi VS grist-core

The behavior of the traditional vi is much different than vim and other clones. Nvi was a actually a re-implementation of the traditional vi for 4BSD (to be clean of AT&T code) and thus was originally intended to be bug-for-bug compatible, but breaking away where the original vi behavior was nonsensical or terrible.

For vim, `set compatible` or `set cp` is close, but still not traditional vi by any means.

A multibyte variant of the tradition vi is maintained - https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/.

Nvi (now on version 1.8x) is also maintained - https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git

Nvi2 is yet another fork of Nvi, https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

Despite the very similar names, all of these editors have a variety of different features, and are structured very differently.

Nvi has a concept of a front-end and a back-end (which uses the BDB database). OpenVi uses the OpenBSD version of Berkeley DB which derives from 1.85. Nvi (1.8x) provides a minimal version of code also derived from that release intended from use with Nvi, and (IIRC) also provides support for using Db3/4/5. Similar situation for Nvi2.

Nvi 1.8 has been structured where a third library layer has been added, which doesn't exist in OpenBSD's vi or OpenVi. There is scripting support (Tcl, Perl, etc.) and GUI code in the other various forks ... all of these support various different options as well.

I should probably make a matrix of these, but you can get an idea by looking at the settable options implemented in each of the variants (as they historically include a comment to document from where the option originated):

OpenVi: https://github.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi/blob/22c2a7022e31d91e09e...

OpenBSD vi: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/vi/common...

Nvi2: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2/blob/5fcdc13656500a8c5b4c073...

Nvi1: https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git/blob/HEAD:/common/options.c#l52

OpenVi: Portable OpenBSD vi for Unix systems\ (22 comments)

and poke around. If the words battery correct horse staple mean something to you, you might have an advantage.

The heart of the software you'll be working with: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/

Because the single-system paradigm doesn't work any more. However, modern replacements do exist, Airtable is one of the first; it's basically the notion of a "spreadsheet with more structure", and then building forms and such on top of that. I've recently been playing with Grist and like it, although it is rough around the edges.

https://www.getgrist.com

i want exactly the opposite - something that does not try to be a spreadsheet, but gives me a grid view of a database table, with concurrent edits a la google sheets, and lets me access the same data from my webapp backend.

i have been searching for this for literally years, all the time maintaining an app as a google sheets script, because much as i would prefer something self-hosted and customisable, that collaborative grid view is the ideal user interface from my users' point of view. so far nothing has fit the bill - basetool (https://github.com/basetool-io/basetool) might have but it's discontinued and underdocumented, and i'm not really a web developer so i don't feel up to the challenge of getting it running and integrated into an app.

grist actually came really close from a ui perspective, but it was too focused on being a spreadsheet and doing computation in the frontend. i filed an issue that explains my use case in more detail: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/issues/422

Founder of Grist here (https://www.getgrist.com/):

- focus on small teams and individuals

- open source (with community contributing!)

- can be run self-managed

- portable data (lossless export in SQLite format)

- full of great features (granular access rules, formulas with python, conditional formatting, webhooks, etc etc)

If it's little-known, it's because we spend too much time building, not enough time selling.

The exact LLM used in the experiment mentioned in this post was upstage-llama-2-70b-instruct-v2.ggmlv3.q2_K. Grist was configured to use it via llama-cpp-python and https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core#ai-formula-assistant...

https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/

Check out Grist in the ‘Access with sane backend’ space. SQLite, open source and fantastic UX https://www.getgrist.com/ and https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

I use and love both Datasette and Grist - they’re complementary.