[GSoC] About the idea: Unicode support in vi

[Kurt Lidl]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 08:20:07PM -0500, Zhihao Yuan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Zhihao Yuan <lichray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Among *all* the GNU/Linux distributions I used, they include a vim
> >> compiled in tiny mode (ln -s it to vi), which doubles the size of nvi,
> >> in their base systems. A vim.tiny contains much more features compared
> >> with nvi, but it's not compatible with POSIX vi.
> >>
> > Let's compare the comparable, I don't really care if PCbsd ship vim as
> > its default, but FreeBSD as the base is not only aimed at desktop
> > specifically. So you should take into account that I may want to run
> > FreeBSD on an adm5120 board with 32MB of RAM, without having a text
> > editor consuming too much disk-space/ram.
> >
> > ??- Arnaud
> 
> If you really want to use vi in a 32MB mem environment, the ex-vi may
> make sense. It consumes 1600KB memory while nvi consumes 2000KB. Note
> that the ee editor uses same amount memory as ex-vi.
> 
> So basically, if no one disagree that we can drop the infinite undo,
> multiple buffer, multiple window and some other potential missing
> features, we can replace the nvi in the base system with ex-vi.

Please don't do this.

I use nvi every day on FreeBSD.  I use the multi-level undo daily,
and the multiple window feature, if not daily, at least weekly.

-Kurt