🔗 Wonderful vi

The speed of change in technology often appears to be the industry's defining characteristic. Nothing highlights that perception more than the recent and relentless march of AI advancements. But for as much as some things in technology change, many other things stay the same. Like vi!

vi is a programming text editor that was created by Bill Joy before computers even had real graphical interfaces, back in 1976. Just five years after the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. In computing terms, we might as well be talking about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs here. It's that old.

But it's fundamental design, splitting insert mode from command mode, remains unchanged in its modern successors, like Vim and Neovim. In fact, the entire vi ethos of maximizing programmer productivity by minimizing keystrokes has carried forward all these years with remarkably little distortion. In 1976, most computers didn't even have a mouse. In 2024, most vi-successor users don't even need one when programming.

That's kinda incredible! That I can sit here, almost half a century after Bill Joy first gave birth to vi, and enjoy the same quirky style of text editing to make modern web apps in 2024. It's not why I use Neovim, but it sure does make it feel extra special.

The other reason it feels special is that vi makes turns manipulating text into a key-based form of Street Fighter. Sure, you can have fun just learning the basic buttons for punching and kicking, but the game unlocks an entirely new dimension the moment you pull off your first hadoken — a fireball move done by making a half circle with the joystick followed by a punch. And now you're off to learn all the special moves followed by techniques for stringing them together into combos.