Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Nothing Like the Original

For many, many years, the source code to the original vi was unavailable without a Unix source code license. Although educational institutions were able to get licenses at a relatively low cost, commercial licenses were always expensive. This fact prompted the creation of all of the vi clones described in this book.

In January 2002, the source code for V7 and 32V UNIX was made available under an open source-style license.^[46] This opened up access to almost all of the code developed for BSD Unix, including ex and vi.

The original code does not compile “out of the box” on modern systems, such as GNU/Linux, and porting it is difficult.^[47] Fortunately, the work has already been done. If you would like to use the original, “real” vi, you can download the source code and build it yourself. See http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ for more information.

^[46] For more information about this, see the Unix Historical Society web site at http://www.tuhs.org.

^[47] We know. We tried.