Fortunately, I don't have to write up an explanation of this, as Joy and Horton already did.

* https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/viin/paper-7.html#section53

It's basically the answer to the question of how one does vi-like visual editing when the cursor cannot be moved to arbitrary locations on the terminal, or sometimes cannot even be moved upwards.

Amusing factoid: It's actually sort of the other way around. open mode was added to ex before visual mode was. visual mode is the answer to the question of how you can take advantage of an ability to move the cursor around arbitrarily.

* https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/1565924...

VIM and STEVIE never implemented it. VIM makes :open do the same as :visual . nvi and nvi2 issue a 'not implemented' error for the :open nex command. Watcom vi does not even have :open . Nor do NeoVIM, nextvi, neatvi, and viless.

Mortice Kern vi has open mode. So does elvis version 2.

That’s a feature. It lets your thumb scroll comfortably in a larger blank area so the content is always in view for you. There is no reason for things to be centered, it does not aid readability.

Yup, I hope every one agrees to leave proper justified text to LaTeX/ConTeXt/Typst/<your_favorite_typesetting_software>, doing such thing for HTML is still ugly and makes things harder to read

Chrome's too, but why? It's just plain HTML.

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=640, initial-scale=1">

It's still very much alive.

I suppose, but you can only install it via the AUR or nixpkgs on linux, and 2 out of the 4 BSDs no longer have ports. Sure, you can compile from source but when it's that old I consider such a state effectively no longer around

I can't think of any, but I can share some examples.

When shredding things like log files, or raw data file, being able to do things like:

  :g/bad line/d

To delete all of the "bad lines". When manually paring down some files, you can use `ma` to do "Mark A" (vs `mb`, which is Mark B). So, I can be scrolling through the file, do the mark when I get to the top of a garbage section, and page or scroll or search to the next "keep" section, and then do `d'a` which means "delete to A", and so it removes all of the stuff I've skipped through.

Doing simple things like:

   !Gformat (! to shell out, G for "the entire buffer", format is the program)

Which runs the entire buffer through the `format` command to wrap paragraphs. I don't necessarily need that feature in my editor, I have a utility that I can use instead.

Of course, you can use `!'a` to a mark. or `!/thing` to run current line to the next "thing" (use `?` for previous).

Banging to utilities is a nice way to develop a pipeline, you basically get to see stuff step by step. So instead of:

    grep thing file | cut -f 1 | sort 

You can vi the file, `!Ggrep thing`, "Yup!", `!G cut -f 1`, "Ok!", `!G sort` and easily see the intermediate steps. (Not recommended on enormous files, since the entire region is replaced.)

The `.` is great for `/word` to find a "word", `cwnew-word`, and apply it selectively. `n` to "search next", and it you like it, `.` to do the `cw` again. Otherwise, keep using `n` until you find the one you like.

And I have no problem running a chunk through a bang command to see what's what, only to just `u`ndo it. (With modern `vim`, you can undo that all the way back to the start if you're doing that pipeline thing.)

And, I would routinely do something like:

  ma$%:'aw/tmp/x.x!vi other.txt then /wherever, :r /tmp/x.x

Mark A, `$` to EOL, `%` to closing brace (imagine a C function header), write from mark A to current line to /tmp/x.x, `!` to shell out to a new `vi` session, then read in the snippet.

Old school, single session, copy and paste. My /tmp is scattered with x.x, x.y, x.1, etc. files.

Along with regex replaces, this is 95% of how I use `vi`. I'm sure there's a bunch of other features, especially in `vim`, but these few bits are flexible and powerful enough to cover my needs. Since I haven't really been found "wanting", I'm not really "looking".

And it started because `vi` was a singular common denominator across all of the disparate UNIX minis I used to work on, so I just managed to work with what was available wherever I went.

Fascinating! I wonder what fork of vi I landed on that didn't have :x for me to have mis-picked-up that bit of trivia.

28 years of vi and TIL about ZZ.

Thanks friend! ^_^

Repeat ZZ to save & exit if there are more files to edit

ZQ - discard & exit