[Lx]

VI, I loved it, back around the '90s, my co-workers thought I was crazy using it while they used edlin (seriously, comparing edlin to VI is nuts). Besides the funky h,j,l,k keyboard cursor movers, VI was awesome and then they changed to the cursor keys. You could get some serious work done in minimal time if you knew what you were doing.

Sadly, I fell prey to the Siren's song of GUI editors.

And Novell's was atrocious. It helps when you start with a gui as the base instead of grafting it onto a basically text based O/S.

[zeugma]

Frankly I think the best feature of vi these days is the macro recording function. I have been able to use that to do astounding thing with large text files.It's something I pretty much use every day.

back in the day I used a DOS-based editor called "Brief", by a company called Underware. It had insanely extensive macro support that I used heavily at the time. To this day, I think Brief (which was bought, then abandoned by the idiots at Borland) is the best editor I ever used. You could write macros that were practically programs themselves. It had features for manipulating text that I haven't seen replicated in any other editor to this very day. I've actually tried to run it in Dosbox recently, but it's just not the same. I'd pay cash money for Brief for Unix.

The best thing about vi is that it is available on any unix box.

I wonder if we have any other Brief fans here at FR. Maybe someday I'll post a vanity to find out.