Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition

12.1. Authors and History

Paul Fox describes the early vile history this way:

vile's design goal has always been a little different than that of the other clones. vile has never really attempted to be a "clone" at all, though most people find it close enough. I started it because in 1990 I wanted to to be able to edit multiple files in multiple windows, I had been using vi for 10 years already, and the sources to Micro-EMACS came floating past my newsreader at a job where I had too much time on my hands. I started by changing the existing keymaps in the obvious way, and ran full-tilt into the "Hey! Where's `insert' mode?" problem. So I hacked a little more, and hacked a little more, and eventually released in '91 or '92. (Starting soon thereafter, major version numbers tracked the year of release: 7.3 was the third release in '97.)

But my goal has always been to preserve finger-feel (as opposed to the display visuals), and, selfishly, to preserve finger-feel most for the commands I use. vile has quite an amazing ex mode, that works very well—it just looks really odd, and a couple of commands which are beyond the scope of the current parser are missing. For the same reasons, vile also won't fully parse existing .exrc files, since I don't really think that's so important—it does simple ones, but more sophisticated ones need some tweaking. But when you toss in vile's built-in command/macro ...