Visual Interface


Visual Interface

(tool, text)(vi) /V-I/, /vi:/, *never* /siks/ A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSDrelease. vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and anearly undisputed hacker favourite outside of MIT until therise of Emacs after about 1984.

It tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neithertake commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, andthe default setup provides no indication of which mode theeditor is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that hehas often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/).Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half therespondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and evensome Emacs fans resort to it as a mail editor and for smallediting jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than thebulkier versions of Emacs).

See holy wars.