Post #2104680

Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's essentially the cleaned-up 1985 ex/vi 3.7 code — small (~25k LOC for the editor itself vs ~38k for nvi), simple, and very readable. Memory footprint is lower (~3MB RSS vs ~6MB for nvi in typical use). Feels snappy. Limits are by design: fixed temp-file blocks, line pointer table capped at LBLKS=900 in the default build (~230k lines, ~30MB of text). Above that: "Tmp file too large". Trade-offs: no set ruler, single-level undo, and not meant for large files. nvi is more practical for daily work; heirloom is closer to the original. Beautiful codebase. Worth a look. #vi #unix