Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 22. V

Valve

See “Steam”

Vaughan, Dorothy

See “Hidden Figures (2017 film)”

Version control

See “Git/GitHub”

vi

One of the fiercest debates in the hacker community has been the text-editor wars: Emacs or vi? It’s like Coke versus Pepsi, but much more passionate. Why do nerds fight over whose text-editor preference is superior? First, let’s look into the history of vi.

vi was originally created by Bill Joy in 1976. Joy also developed an editor called ex. Later, he would go on to found Sun Microsystems and create Java, one of today’s most important application development languages.

Joy created vi as the visual mode of ex—a friendlier face for a relatively archaic application. Those of us who got into computing after the 1980s may wonder what “visual mode” means. Most versions of vi have a fully text-based user interface, but even that does have a visual component! Even though it’s all text, you’ll see that you’re running an application, and the lines are numbered for handy reference.

As open source software, vi has been forked many times. A particularly popular fork is Vim—for “visual improved”. Hackers who prefer vi (or Vim) to Emacs tout it for being flexible, customizable, portable, and lightweight.

Tim O’Reilly, who founded the company that publishes this book, used to use a version of Emacs until the Emacs profile he was using disappeared. He tried vi and was hooked. He wrote in 1999 that he found it “remarkably easy to use and tremendously powerful. Like a lot ...