Table of content:-

1) Vi text editor

2) Interface

3) History

4) Derivatives and clones

5) Using Text Editors

6) Pico Editor

7) Emacs Editor

Vim text editor

9) Modal editing

10) Features and improvements over vi

11) Types of text editors

Vi text editor:-

vi is a family of screen-oriented text editors which share common characteristics, such as methods of invocation from the operating system command interpreter, and characteristic user interface features. The portable subset of the behavior of vi programs, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by, and thus standardized by the Single Unix Specification^[1] and POSIX.

The original vi program was written by Bill Joy in 1976 for an early BSD Unix release. Some current implementations of vi can trace their source code ancestry to Bill Joy; others are completely new, largely compatible reimplementations.

The name vi is derived from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command visual in ex; the command in question switches the line editor ex to visual mode. Many popular implementations of vi are free and open source software, including some based on source code derived from Berkeley Unix. There are non-free implementations of vi, found in proprietary implementations of Unix.

Interface:-

vi is a modal editor: it operates in either insert mode (where typed text becomes part of the document) or normal mode (where keystrokes are interpreted as commands that control the edit session). Typing i while in normal mode switches the editor to insert mode. Typing i again at this point places an “i” character in the document. How the i keystroke is processed depends on the editor mode. From insert mode, pressing the escape key switches the editor back to normal mode.

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