On Mon, 8 Oct 2018, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> An excellent (although secondary) source from the precambrian era,
> Morris I Bolsky
> "The /vi/ User's Hanbdbook"
> (c) 1984 by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated
> (c) 1985 by AT&T Technologies, Inc
> published by Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-941733-8
> clearly documents [for "Version 3 of /vi/ on UNIX System V, Release 2"]
> the behavior that both '(' and ')' only stop at 2-spaces-after-punctuation.
> >>From page 19, section "Moving cursor to a sentence, etc., in buffer":
> Description of ')' or '3)'
> > Moves RIGHT (and DOWN, etc.) to the beginning of the next or 3rd next
> > SENTENCE. End of a sentence is detected by a ., !, or ? followed by
> > 2 Spaces or a newline.
> Description of '(' or '3('
> > Same as above, but moves LEFT (and UP, etc.) to the preceding
> > or 3rd preceding beginning of sentence.
>
>
> I have the original 4.3BSD & 4.4BSD printed manual sets packed away
> in boxes, but the volumes I have out on a shelf don't include the
> detailed /vi/ documentation. If anyone cares deeply, I could unpack
> the relevant volumes to see what behavior they document.
See original vi:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2BSD/doc/vi/vi.chars
( Retreats to the beginning of a sentence, or
to the beginning of a LISP s-expression if
the lisp option is set. A sentence ends at a
. ! or ? which is followed by either the end
of a line or by two spaces. Any number of
closing ) ] " and ' characters may appear
after the . ! or ?, and before the spaces or
end of line. Sentences also begin at para-
graph and section boundaries (see { and [[
below). A count advances that many sentences
(4.2, 6.8).
) Advances to the beginning of a sentence. A
count repeats the effect. See ( above for
the definition of a sentence (4.2, 6.8).
Also see the vi.in tutorial there that also documents the "two
spaces".
(The earlier "visual" Ex didn't have the feature in the code or docs.)
