Cool, the first distro I mentioned in my post was Slackware, in 1995. It came on cdrom with a book I picked up at the time. I think it took me a couple of months of using it to realize the vi I was using was elvis, a clone that Patrick shipped with Slackware by default. After reading about Vim and Bram I realized I had to install Vim separately.

I'm back to Slackware these days after moving away from Debian because, well there were reasons. Interestingly when I read this article this morning I realized that true to form Slackware is still using 7.4 so I downloaded the source and am compiling 8 this evening after work.

Thanks Bram indeed! :-)

My first distro was Slackware, and I bought it in 1995 as well. Mine came with a Unix book from O'Reilly. The only thing I remember about the book was a quote at the top of one of the chapters, "Dyslexics of the world, untie!"

I too used elvis for quite a while, until someone at the bank I worked for at the time introduced me to Vim. I've never met Bram, but I always feel a depth of appreciation when I see his name pop up in the editor window.