[Mike Betts]

Jack,

Written in 1976 by Bill Joy at Berkley for BSD, the vi editor was incorporated into System V of UNIX and has been around ever since.

For more information on the history please see:

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html

vi (pronounced "vee eye" and never capitalized) has a plain keyboard interface for every function. As an example: h, j, k and l move the cursor because Teletype interfaces to the old PDP-11, et cetera had no arrow keys.

If you are a Windows person and will infrequently program on UNIX, Linux, et cetera, vi is a bit of a pain to learn and you should not bother. It really takes a few days to get the hang of it.

However, if you want to be a geek (and be proud of it), vi is one of those tools that you will have to master if you want to be taken seriously as a programmer... IMHO.

For a good tutorial from the guy who wrote it, see:

http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/12....html#section6

Good luck.