[gentoo-dev] Why not vi?

[Eric Moncrieff]

Hello Gentoo Team,

I installed Gentoo today, and am  largly very impressed by what I see.
Many of my favourite BSDisms are here, as are most of the vital System
V features.  In short, great work! 

However, there's  one thing I'm really  unclear on.  You  left out any
mention of  the old  UNIX standard editor,  vi.  I've used  many, many
different UNIXen over the years,  and the *only* things which *always*
worked were /bin/sh and /usr/bin/vi.  They were sometimes in different
places, but vi always, *always* was around somewhere.  Not in Gentoo.

When I  discovered, to my surprise, that  I was forced to  use nano, I
immediately decided to take your  Portage system for a spin, and typed
'emerge  app-editors/vi'.  Vi was  built from  source (though  I'm not
clear on which particular vi you  used).  However, when I tried to run
it, it segfaulted.  So I was stuck with nano. 

So I  tried 'emerge app-editors/vim', which  built all of X  for me (I
have to remember the --pretend option).   This was fine, but it took a
long time, and all I wanted to do was edit my startup scripts.  

So now I've got a working vi, which I'm happy about.  Of course, after
kde finishes building,  I'm going to build emacs, so  I won't be using
my new  vi very much, but  still...For all this long  time, we've been
able to  count on vi  as the quick,  omnipresent editor.  But  not for
Gentoo.  

Why not? 

Thanks  again  for  your   cool  distribution.   I'm  really  enjoying
interacting with it; it's sane and clean.  I just like vi. 

Eric
** 
Eric Moncrieff                                    eric@×××××××××××.org

"If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a 
giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not 
free to draw a giraffe."  --G. K. Chesterton
**
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