heirloom-ex-vi VS neovim

Using Carsten Kunze's actively maintained continuation of Gunnar Ritter's (outstanding) traditional ex/vi project is highly recommended. See https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi/.

The parent project on SourceForge hasn't had any activity for 15 years, nor a release in 17+ years, but still contain various known bugs, all of which are fixed in Carsten Kunze's project.

Attempting this clone of traditional vi from GitHub instead of SourceForge (the SF version lacked libuxre which was available on the GH version), it looks like heirloom ex also cleared the screen, unlike ed(1).

I came across a more recently updated copy of that code which works with modern terminals "out of the box", and includes other bugfixes: https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi

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.