[GSoC] About the idea: Unicode support in vi

[Zhihao Yuan]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Paul Schenkeveld <freebsd at psconsult.nl> wrote:
> 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.
>
> I like the idea of adding Unicode support to nvi but I hate the idea of
> replacing nvi in the base system by something else.  I've been there
> before, when administering a heterogenous environment with Unix, BSD and
> Linux systems, being a heavy user of vi, it's frustrating if commands in
> various versions of vi do not behave *exactly* the same, e.g. different
> versions of vi leave the cursor in different places after undo, the
> effect of the repeat command (.) after an undo command, the availability
> or not to do something like /pattern/z. to find and position the found
> text in the middle of the screen so you can immediately see the context.
>
> Administering hundreds of FreeBSD systems at various sites would become
> a nightmare if frequently used utilities in the base system do not
> behave exactly the same between different builds, a true POLA violation
> I think.  I truly hope that adding unicode to nvi doesn't change the
> behaviour of nvi, at least not when not using actually Unicode.

I will improve nvi only, and I won't break the traditional functions.
But your words reminds me that, perhaps the move of cursor is a
problem for a mbytes-enabled vi. We will see.

>
> I think it makes more sense to grow a WITHOUT_NVI knob in buildworld so
> that people building for embedded systems can exclude nvi and include
> another version of vi when really pressed for space, like we can replace
> the base systems sendmail by sendmail from ports or another MTA.
>
> Regards,
>
> Paul Schenkeveld
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-- 
Zhihao Yuan
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.