Creation[edit]

Bill Joy, the original creator of the vi editor

vi was derived from a sequence of UNIX command line editors, starting with ed,
which was a line editor designed to work well on teleprinters, rather than display
terminals. Within AT&T Corporation, where ed originated, people seemed to be happy
with an editor as basic and unfriendly as ed, George Coulouris recalls:[7]
[...] for many years, they had no suitable terminals. They carried on with TTYs and
other printing terminals for a long time, and when they did buy screens for
everyone, they got Tektronix 4014s. These were large storage tube displays. You
can't run a screen editor on a storage-tube display as the picture can't be
updated. Thus it had to fall to someone else to pioneer screen editing for Unix,
and that was us initially, and we continued to do so for many years.
Coulouris considered the cryptic commands of ed to be only suitable for
"immortals", and thus in February 1976, he enhanced ed (using Ken Thompson's ed
source as a starting point) to make em (the "editor for mortals"[8]) while acting
as a lecturer at Queen Mary College.[7] The em editor was designed for display
terminals and was a single-line-at-a-time visual editor. It was one of the first
programs on Unix to make heavy use of "raw terminal input mode", in which the
running program, rather than the terminal device driver, handled all keystrokes.
When Coulouris visited UC Berkeley in the summer of 1976, he brought a DECtape
containing em, and showed the editor to various people. Some people considered this
new kind of editor to be a potential resource hog, but others, including Bill Joy
were impressed.[7]
Inspired by em, and by their own tweaks to ed,[2] Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, both
graduate students at UC Berkeley, took code from em to make en,[2][9] and then
"extended" en to create ex version 0.1.[2] After Haley's departure, Bruce Englar
encouraged Joy to redesign the editor,[10] which he did June through October 1977
adding a full-screen visual mode to ex.[11]
Many of the ideas in ex's visual mode (a.k.a. vi) were taken from other software
that existed at the time. According to Bill Joy,[2] inspiration for vi's visual
mode came from the Bravo editor, which was a bimodal editor. In an interview about
vi's origins, Joy said:[2]
A lot of the ideas for the screen editing mode were stolen from a Bravo manual I
surreptitiously looked at and copied. Dot is really the double-escape from Bravo,
the redo command. Most of the stuff was stolen. There were some things stolen from
ed—we got a manual page for the Toronto version of ed, which I think Rob Pike had
something to do with. We took some of the regular expression extensions out of
that.

ADM-3A terminal keyboard layout

Joy used a Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal. On this terminal, the Escape key was at
the location now occupied by the Tab key on the widely used IBM PC keyboard (on the
left side of the alphabetic part of the keyboard, one row above the middle row).
This made it a convenient choice for switching vi modes. Also, the keys h,j,k,l
served double duty as cursor movement keys and were inscribed with arrows, which is
why vi uses them in that way. The ADM-3A had no other cursor keys. Joy explained
that the terse, single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the
display were a result of the slow 300 baud modem he used when developing the
software and that he wanted to be productive when the screen was painting slower
than he could think.[9]
Distribution[edit]
Joy was responsible for creating the first BSD Unix release in March, 1978, and
included ex 1.1 (dated 1 February 1978)[12] in the distribution, thereby exposing
his editor to an audience beyond UC Berkeley.[13] From that release of BSD Unix
onwards, the only editors that came with the Unix system were ed and ex. In a 1984
interview, Joy attributed much of the success of vi to the fact that it was bundled
for free, whereas other editors, such as Emacs, could cost hundreds of dollars.[2]
Eventually it was observed that most ex users were spending all their time in
visual mode,[citation needed] and thus in ex 2.0 (released as part of Second
Berkeley Software Distribution in May, 1979), Joy created vi as a hard link to ex,
[14] such that when invoked as vi, ex would automatically start up in its visual
mode. Thus, vi is not the evolution of ex, vi is ex.
Joy described ex 2.0 (vi) as a very large program, barely able to fit in the memory
of a PDP-11/70,[15] thus although vi may be regarded as a small, lightweight,
program today, it was not seen that way early in its history. By version 3.1,
shipped with 3BSD in December 1979, the full version of vi was no longer able to
fit in the memory of a PDP-11;[16] the editor would be also too big to run on PC/IX
for the IBM PC in 1984.[17]
Joy continued to be lead developer for vi until version 2.7 in June 1979,[10][18]
and made occasional contributions to vi's development until at least version 3.5 in
August 1980.[18] In discussing the origins of vi and why he discontinued
development, Joy said:[2]
I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think one of the interesting
things is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go,
it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its
programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to
me. I also wasn't very good at optimizing code when I wrote vi. I think the
redisplay module of the editor is almost intractable. It does a really good job for
what it does, but when you're writing programs as you're learning... That's why I
stopped working on it.
What actually happened was that I was in the process of adding multiwindows to vi
when we installed our VAX, which would have been in December of '78. We didn't have
any backups and the tape drive broke. I continued to work even without being able
to do backups. And then the source code got scrunched and I didn't have a complete
listing. I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was
when I gave up. After that, I went back to the previous version and just documented
the code, finished the manual and closed it off. If that scrunch had not happened,
vi would have multiple windows, and I might have put in some programmability—but I
don't know.
The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore
you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing
you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing. I think multiple levels of undo would be
wonderful, too. But fundamentally, vi is still ed inside. You can't really fool it.
It's like one of those pinatas—things that have candy inside but has layer after
layer of paper mache on top. It doesn't really have a unified concept. I think if I
were going to go back—I wouldn't go back, but start over again.
In 1979,[2] Mark Horton took on responsibility for vi. Horton added support for
arrow and function keys, macros, and improved performance by replacing termcap with
terminfo.[10][19]
Ports and clones[edit]