History of Vi
- The standard UNIX editor "ed" existed on UNIX systems practically since its inception:
- For a time "ex", an extension of ed was created to support some features:
- When visual text terminals (like VT-100) started to appear, Bill Joy created the "vi" editor as an extension to ex:
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- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
- vi had relocatable cursor and one could edit text relatively conveniently with it.
- It supported all the QWERTY keys as well as ESC.
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- Possibly because these were the greatest common denominator of the keys on the keyboards that appeared then.