OpenVi VS neovim

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)

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.