Some alternatives to vim

Recently some slop vommits were made to the source code repo hosting vim, the well-known editor based on vi the well known Visual Editor from Unix.

Depending on your viewpoint this is somewhere between world-shatteringly deplorable to irrelevant. For me, it is a minor annoyance. I use vi/vim on the daily and i do not want to be associated with slop vommit tools. But i’m also somewhat pragmatic and recognise that i probably already am.

The short version is that i have now compiled modern-ish version of both vi and nvi and will be trying those.

I mostly switched to vim in the mid 1990s, swiching away from nvi because it had bugs over the execution of paste buffers (did you know @x executes buffer x as if it were typed into vi?).

But ever since then i’ve really been wanting to return to nvi, or maybe even vi. Like, i know vim does some cool things like you can use the arrow keys in insert mode, but honestly i don’t use them that much. And it is does a lot of things that lowkey annoy me. Anyway.

Fast forward to 2026 and nvi now works. Maybe. I have spent some time (a not very productive day) investigating some alternatives to vim:

• evi a hard-fork of Vim from a point early enough to avoid Ai. I have no intention of using this, because for me if i am switching away, i may as well revert to nvi or vi. But it was a NerdNextDoor fediverse post which alerted me to the slop vommit issue.
• emacs. Haha. Emacs was actually the first Serious Editor i used that wasn’t entirely parochial (i used E and ZED before that, but they existed only on PHOENIX the university’s baroque 3084Q mainframe). And i know emacs pretty well. emacs 16. I will not be renewing my interesting in emacs.
• nvi. nvi is new vi, made to replace vi. But there are loads of different versions. On my Mac the brew version installs but has display problems for non-ASCII characters, like þ. I found the Keith Bostic (author of nvi) source, but couldn’t work out how to compile it. I found repo.or.cz/nvi.git but it’s geoblocked (thanks to the UK’s oppressive digital regime). So what i’m actually using to type this blog article is:
• nvi2 (it compiles a binary called nvi) which is https://github.com/lichray/nvi2 . Despite my trepidation at it requiring cmake and ninja to build (which i had to install from homebrew) the build instructions ran fine, trouble free, and relatively quickly.
• Heirloom vi at https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi which i have now compiled (with sh configure ; make) and seems to be fine so far. Traditionalists will be delighted to note that the arrow keys do not work in insert mode. There is a note in the README about getting PageUp and PageDown keys to work tho.

The big change since the 1990s is that Unicode now works.

Addendum on a vi bug

I discovered while writing blog post that...

de and ye put different texts into the paste buffer. ye includes the character under the cursor, de does not (this last bit seems like a bug, but the fact they are different is definitely a bug).

END