[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Vi package

[Loui Chang]

On Wed 09 Feb 2011 11:23 -0500, Stéphane Gaudreault wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was looking at FS#20778 and was wondering what we should do with it.
> 
> While it is true that the "traditional vi" is buggy and not user
> friendly. It does not seems that BusyBox is a good alternative.
> 
> There are options here:
> 
> 1) Statu quo
> Pro : 
>    * Support for multi-byte character encodings like UTF-8
>    * Small size
> Cons :
>    * Did I said that it is buggy ?
>    * Use of this old software in the installer may give a strange
>    impression to new users as they are faced with an editor from the
>    '70 on a distro where everything is up to date.
>    * Appears to be no longer be updated upstream.
> 
> Opinions?

I'd say stick with the status quo.
I don't find anything too wrong with the traditional vi. There's the
file size and line length limit and those aren't really that bad.
The wide terminal issue has been worked around by changing the config
header.

If you want to do heavy editing other programs are more appropriate in
our modern age. Vi is more appropriate for light editing like when doing
installation or configuration. Are other bugs that you mention
documented somewhere? I'm interested in learning about them.

If you can use vim you probably should be able to use vi without too
much difficulty.

I guess you could argue that having two basic editors (vi and nano) is
unnecessary, vi is usually expected to be on a basic system, and nano
just bugs me. :D