vi

Technical Beauty — Episode 28 2.7 million people have visited Stack Overflow to learn how to exit a text editor. One in every 20,000 visitors. During peak hours, 80 people per hour, trapped in a program they opened by accident. The most feared tool in computing is also the most elegant. One does appreciate the irony. The Constraint Bill Joy, graduate student at Berkeley, writing code over a 300 baud modem on an ADM-3A terminal. The screen redraws slower than he can think. Every keystroke costs time. Every wasted character is a visible delay. So he built an editor where nothing is wasted. No menus. No mouse. No chrome. Every key does something. The Escape key sits where Tab sits today, because on the ADM-3A it was one finger away. hjkl navigates because the ADM-3A printed arrows on those keys. Colon enters command mode because on that keyboard, colon required no Shift. vi was not designed for comfort. It was designed for a 300 baud modem. The constraint produced the grammar. The Grammar