Reply To: Fresh view of text editors – command and graphical variations

I am using the command line instance of the Neovim (nvim) text editor today. All is well; this is an excellent follow-up to the Vim text editor. Most of what it does for every day commands are IDENTICAL to Vim. It’s fast and efficient, and it’s worth learning the commands; not immediately intuitive, but once you master it you’ll definitely appreciate what it can do. Neovim and Vim are classic examples of the “modal” method of editing – the normal mode is command mode, where you edit or alter existing text. To input new text, simply enter an insert text command; the a command, for example, allows you to insert text AFTER the cursor point, the i command inserts before the current location; Esc returns you to edit mode. The sequence :x! will force a write and quit; the longer :wq! works too. With Vim or Nvim it’s also possible to map function keys to these capabilities, simplifying things a bit. That’s one thing that the classic vi did not offer, at least initially.

However, if you want a SUPER small, true to the original vi implementation, @brgs shared about that some time ago earlier in this topic. The original vi, updated with only defect fixes, is significantly smaller than either nvi, a BSD implementation of vi, much smaller than Vim or Nvim, though only the oldest systems will be affected by the size difference; all of these editors are very efficient!