[from `Visual Interface'] A screen editor crufted together by
Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de facto
standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite
outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984.
Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take
commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default
setup on older versions provides no indication of which mode the
editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that he has often
heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now a vi
clone named `vile'). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim
and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a
1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to
it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it
starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See
holy wars.
