Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by JdeBP on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:53PM
(#50443696)
It's not vim. It's Bostic's nvi. And in fact one of the things that vim users need to be reminded about is that the habitual :wqa and :qa are vim-isms and do not work in other clones such as nvi.
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Fair enough, I stand corrected. The point I was trying to make though (and clearly I failed, since I’ve been heavily downvoted) is that the poco/nano/atto ‘lineage’ of “Microsoft Edit”-like text editors are quite a bit more approachable for newcomers than the holy-war dichotomy of vi and emacs would seem to imply.
One of the things that FreeBSD has had for a long time is the 'Easy Editor', written in 1990 for HP-UX and added to FreeBSD a couple of years later. There was even its successor 'Another Easy Editor' which the world has completely forgotten about.
* https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=ee§ion=1
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ee&manpath=FreeBSD...
But NetBSD and OpenBSD went their own ways on this, to the extent that NetBSD didn't even have a non-vi-like editor in base until just a month or so ago.
Yeah I just found it genuinely amusing that the author felt a duty to digress into quitting vi for the sake of their audience but I’ve been downvoted and apparently people must have very strong opinions on this and I apologise for any offence caused.
[sobs in ed(1)/ex(1)]
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:32PM
(#50447823)
The true vi:
Vi is actually one mode of editing within the editor ex. When you are running vi you can escape to the line oriented editor of ex by giving the command Q. All of the : commands which were introduced above are available in ex. Likewise, most ex commands can be invoked from vi using :. Just give them without the : and follow them with a CR.