vi: /V-I/, _not_ /vi:/ and _never_ /siks/ n. [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.
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