On Mon, 16 Mar 2020 at 08:28:19 -0400, Boyuan Yang wrote:
> P.S. Anyone know why we did not use the vanilla vi at the very beginning?
Bill Joy's AT&T Unix vi wasn't Free Software when Debian started, so
1990s Debian had to use a Free clone like elvis, nvi or vim. According
to Wikipedia, the BSDs use nvi for essentially the same reason.
Other Linux distributions had a similar constraint: for example, I think
Fedora's vi binary is actually vim, compiled in a configuration similar
to our vim-tiny.
smcv
