Post #2104679

Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's essentially the cleaned-up 1985 ex/vi 3.7 code, brought forward by Gunnar Ritter and Carsten Kunze: small, simple, and very readable — about 25k LOC for the editor itself, versus 38k for nvi. The memory footprint is lower too, around 3MB RSS against nvi's 6MB in typical use, and it feels snappy in daily use. The limits are by design rather than oversight. Fixed temp-file blocks and a line-pointer table capped at LBLKS=900 in the default build give you about 230k lines, or roughly 30MB of text. Beyond that, you get the classic "Tmp file too large" — and that's fine, because a screen editor isn't the right tool for huge files anyway. Trade-offs worth knowing: no set ruler, single-level undo, and a hard ceiling on file size. nvi is more practical for daily work, especially if you live in YAML where column awareness matters. But heirloom is closer to the original, and the codebase is genuinely beautiful. Worth a look. #vi #unix #suckless #nvi