Site dedicated to the UNIX vi editor, with thanks to AEshells.org for their Slackware shell with xvi, Vile and Elvis.
For our first trick, we will attempt the first (?) haiku about vi (remembering that vi is a two-syllable word: "v-eye"):
Powerful vi:
Tool, not environment.
You are everywhere!
Command prompt ready:
Linux shell beats Window's hell.
vi's not bloat-ware.
We evoke vi:
i to input then Escape,
back to command mode.
The unbelievers
mock our vi, want mode-less.
vi is tough love.
The various "flavors" of vi are known by creative acronyms, such as Elvis, Vim, Vile, etc. (we don't know what happened with Lemmy). The acronym for this website pays tribute to Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). More about him later*, we hope. The language is full of words with the v-i letter combination, so we will try to offer more suggestions for vi-related words as we go along. One such word happens to exist as a work of art we would like to reproduce here (Ditto machine style):
b w b w
v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t o r y
i o o o o r
c g b g w g b g o
t v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t
o e o e o e o e c
r g b g w g b i
y v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v
v e o e o e o y
i g b g w g r
c v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i c t o
t e o e o e t
o g b g w c
r v i c t o r y v i c t o r y v i
y e o e o v
v g b g w y
i v i c t o r y v i c t o r
c b w e o e o o
t o o g b g t
o o o v i c t o r y v i c
r g g e o e i
y r o t c i v y r o t c i v y r o t c i v y r o t c i v
e e
hommage a mondriaan
Ivo Vroom
(Published in Concrete Poetry: A World View, Mary Ellen Solt,
Editor; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968)
We will attempt our own vi ascii "art" here:
vi xvi vim vile vico vi vi vi
vile winvi ex-vi vim stevie
lemmy nvi elvis vico elvis
vile elvis winvi nvi vi vi
vi stevie calvin xvi lemmy
elvis vi ex-vi vim winvi
lemmy elvis vico vile
vile xvi elvis vico
vi calvin vi vi vi
elvis vico ex-vi
ex-vi vi vi vi
stevie elvis
vico calvin
vi vi vi vi
Maybe not an award winner, but a viable attempt to say "vi" via the medium at hand (we would also like to use the terms viaduct, vigor and vibrant in this sentence).
Books about vi, a few suggestions:
UNIX Unleashed: Internet Edition by Robin Burk and David Horvath (1997) has a good chapter on Text Editing using vi and ex.
Harley Hahn's The Unix Companion (1995) has a helpful and strongly-opinionated chapter on vi: "Whenever you walk by a computer and see someone using Pico, be kind. Pause for a second, and remind yourself that: 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'" [But the Pine/Pico combo is a pretty good email system!]
The Slackware owner's manual, Slackware Linux Installation and Getting Started (1996) has a short introductory chapter on vi.
The file "vi.doc" distributed with Calvin gives a pretty thorough description of vi operation and commands.
Some classic vi books: VI: The Unix Screen Editor by August Hansen (1986), Editing in a UNIX Environment: The vi/ex Editor by Mohamed el Lozy (1985), and The Ultimate Guide to the vi and ex Text Editors by the Hewlett-Packard Company (1990).
Another good vi page.
Why is Vile vile? It is neither fish nor fowl -- looks like vi, but its guts are emacs. [A cool program!]
Elvis vi is The King! And Lemmy rocks!
Why is vi the Vishnu of editors? It has the most incarnations: Vim, Vile, Elvis, Lemmy, Calvin, Stevie, WinVi, xvi, nvi, bvi, ex-vi, levee, BusyBox's vi, etc.
Xvi is xcellent! Small size and it runs on UNIX, Linux, DOS. Read more and download at http://xvi.sourceforge.net.
Calvin says "Less is more!" -- DOS executable is 46 KB. Xvi in second place: DOS executable 120 KB.
Speaking of Calvin, we had the opportunity to mess around recently with a HP Jornada 720 Handheld PC (Windows CE). It has 32 MB flash storage and space for a CompactFlash diskette. We investigated putting vi on it, and tried two ways: 1) VimCE from www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/vim.html, 2) PocketDOS from www.pocketdos.com, plus Calvin from http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html#versions -- of the versions of vi for DOS we tried, Calvin was the only one old enough to work on the 186 architecture that PocketDOS emulates. Way to go Calvin! [Update: xvi also works!] A third way, that we didn't try, would be to load ELKS (Embedded Linux Kernel Subset) boot disk from the PocketDOS website; this would presumably include some version of vi. [UPDATE: the Jornada pooped-out, so we found a Palm Zire 31 as a replacement. No version of vi available, so we're experimenting with various editors off www.palmblvd.com, etc. -- of these, we especially like CardTXT (www.freewarepalm.com/docs/cardtxt.shtml) for editing .txt files and saving them to the memory card (it can also handle Palm doc files); this editor satisfies our appreciation for plain ol' ascii txt. Another interesting choice for the Palm OS is pedit (www.paulcomputing.com) by Paul Nevai of Ohio. Pedit is well tied-in with the Palm memo system. Shinji Igarashi of Japan has some promising programs, including XtEdit (http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA033984). A useful utility by Softick: Card Export II (www.softick.com/cardexport2).]
Viceroy Vibe, a vile rant:
Excluded from society for fear of "second-hand smoke" and castigated for their perceived higher "social cost", smokers are among the most despised people on earth. Life is good, but why this undue burden on the lives of smokers? The infirm and in-pain have the "Right to Die" -- and the unborn, too. Are smokers worth more than children? A culture is unhinged that can so aggressively "save lives" cutting smoking rates, while funding enterprises that cut life from the womb.
Another problem with the attack on smoking is that it creates a vacuum sure to be filled by something worse. Children in schools are taught during "Red Ribbon Week" that all tobacco, drugs and alcohol are equally bad and evil -- giving them no perspective on relative harm. Consider the alternatives:
-- If you were flying on an airplane, would you feel more comfortable knowing that the pilot had smoked a cigarette before take-off or had a shot of whiskey?
-- If you were trying to relax after a busy day, would you be better off having a glass of wine with dinner or buying drugs from a guy in the park?
-- Is it better for the family to have a tobacco-smoke-scented house or be destroyed by an alcoholic parent?
-- When out driving with friends, is it better to smoke cigars or chug beer?
Expecting perfection is delusional. Moderation is a reasonable goal.
Rates of binge drinking on campuses have skyrocketed (especially among young women), with the resultant sexual assault, car accidents, violence, alcoholism, death. The social pleasure of smoking being so denigrated, is it surprising that students adopt "socially acceptable" binge drinking instead?
A Viceroy is no virtue, but at least its vibe is positive.
Mythos of the Tobacco Spirit
On a vision quest, Running Bull hung from hooks in his chest
during the Sun Dance and waited in pain. At a point past
exhaustion, the vision came: A spirit woman approached,
touched his wounds and spoke to him, "Once, my child, our
people were strong warriors, holy, who served the Sacred Pipe.
They offered smoke to the Four Winds and their lives were
blessed by the Holy Spirit. When men from across the ocean
came with gun powder and whiskey, our people began to die
within themselves. Those not killed by guns were given the
slow death by drink, abandoning the Sacred Pipe and our
traditions. I am here to give you a message of renewal;
I am the spirit of the tobacco plant, which is a gift to all
peoples, but which has been defiled and cast down. Soon
enough, it will rise again to heal hearts and minds."
Advice on Vice:
a. Don't do drugs. Either the drugs will screw your brain or you will go to jail, or both.
b. If you drink, be moderate. Follow the example of Italian culture and only drink in the social context of a meal. Stick with beer or wine, rather than hard liquor. Drinking is not a competition: less is more. Don't hang-out with binge drinkers.
c. If you smoke, do it for enjoyment, not out of habit. Smokers often get used to having a particular amount of nicotine per day. If smoking becomes a burden, give it up or make a switch to pipe, cigar or smokeless tobacco. If you desire to quit smoking, Prof. Brad Rodu of the University of Louisville has written an excellent book: "For Smokers Only: How Smokeless Tobacco Can Save Your Life" -- available from www.smokersonly.org, 502-561-7273.
d. Coffee is the safest choice.
e. Walk a lot; nurture your talents; be moderate in vice, but bold in virtue!
When you do Windows to launch Telnet to your shell or whatever, keep a few good programs around: WinVi, PDFCreator, PolyEdit, Lemmy [Update 7-May-09: the link to Lemmy is not working. What's up Lemmy?! This is bad news because we just migrated to another computer and our registered copy of Lemmy cannot be copied to the new computer without Lemmy thinking it is an un-registered copy -- and our registration email with the codes in it cannot be found! If Lemmy is dead, please Mr. Developer, give him eternal life by making him Freeware. That is our hope.]
Send a page! So, whatever happened to beepers/pagers? Since we try to stay 10-years behind the trend in technology, we have finally (Nov-08) become interested in pagers. Not a lot of information out there in Internet land about the current fate of pagers. Most people assume that pagers have been outmoded by cellphones, but pagers are still used by doctors, emergency medical teams, disaster-relief workers, etc., because beepers often function when cellphone networks are down. Also, pagers are still a low-cost supplement to other forms of communication. Alphanumeric pages can be sent via phone, the Internet, or using SNPP Software on your computer. So rather than having to participate in the seemingly never-ending cellphone chat, let people send you an alphanumeric page that you can review and act on in your own time. O sanity! A family might consider getting a paging account with multiple pagers as a way to stay in touch and share information.
Like our previous attempt to write the first vi haiku, we will try to do the same for the pager:
Beeper breaks the mood.
Wandering the boulevard,
we are not alone.
A code in numbers
or an alpha text to read,
the screen reveals:
"Hello, here at last!"
521-3553
Have they come so soon?
The night, the deep black
covers us; pager glowing
pale green faces.
Send a FAX! Another great older technology: the facsimile machine. The wonder of the fax machine -- when it first became available -- was its ability to transmit IMAGES over phone lines which had previously been limited to voice. Now with email attachments of all sorts (photos, documents, etc.) faxing seems behind the times, but is still a very useful device. In fact, every day we (royal) grow more weary of the on-line "wired" interface to the world[-wide web]. Shut off the damn thing. The kids can't do a school report without a Google search or cut-and-pasting from "Wikipedia"; they can hardly browse a book to pick up answers to an assignment, so conditioned they are to doing KEYWORD searches on a computer. Soon it is going off! FAX OFF the Internet is how we are feeling today. [Dec-18-08]
Before vi we had a CoCo -- the Tandy Color Computer -- which we used to make a [maga]zine called Canvas Chautauqua. Radio Shack had a real success with the TRS-80 Color Computer (produced from 1980 to 1991). We subscribed to "The Rainbow Magazine" (in its prime over a hundred pages chocked with ads for CoCo hardware, software and accessories); we learned the basics of Microware's OS-9 which had been ported to the CoCo; and we had the honor of knowing electronics wizard Al Dages during his years as President of the Atlanta Computer Society (which sponsored the annual Atlanta CoCo Fest). We used TeleWriter-128 under RS-DOS and Ved/Vprint (by Bob van der Poel) under OS-9.
On "Computer-aided" band practice, a letter to the Band Director:
Dear [Band Director],
My [child] is enjoying [his/her] [Middle School] band experience playing
[flute] and is planning on continuing next year, but I have some concerns
about the "computerization" of band class with the "Smartmusic" program.
My wife and I keep TV and computer use to a minimum, trying to encourage
our [sons/daughters] to "think outside the box" and not get into the habit
of believing that every transaction of life has to be filtered through
the Internet. Cell phones, texting, Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Google,
Wickipedia, video games, email, etc. have TAKEN OVER the consciousness of
our culture.
We think it is critical that people start rediscovering what it means
to do something free of the entanglement of technology, such as playing
an instrument, writing a poem, painting, drawing, visiting with friends,
going to concerts, walking in the park, planting a garden, doing chores
around the house, developing a hobby, appreciating the light of day,
trying a new recipe, getting some exercise, etc.
Smartmusic is just one more reason to spend more time in front of a
computer screen. Soon we will not have children anymore, we will have
androids with all their stimulus coming from the technology they are
constantly plugged into.
So, is there a way to return to an acoustic model of band
instruction/practice? Think of all the great artists in ages past who
became masters of their instruments with none of the "advantages" of
the Internet (or even electricity)!
Thanks very much for all you do to encourage [my child's] enthusiasm
for Band. And thanks for taking the time to ponder over my concerns.
Best regards,
[Concerned Parent]
[22-Feb-09]
*Before nihilism, nausea and deconstruction, Giambattista Vico provided the cure: "Let us constantly cultivate the divine force of our mind" and "Let us fashion our spirit by virtue and wisdom" (On Humanistic Education; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993; p. 141). Key Words: VIrtue & diVIne. Vico values Vercelli.