r1w1s1 on Nostr: Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's essentially the cleaned-up ...
Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's
essentially the cleaned-up 1985 ex/vi 3.7 code, brought
forward by Gunnar Ritter and Carsten Kunze: small, simple,
and very readable — about 25k LOC for the editor itself,
versus 38k for nvi. The memory footprint is lower too,
around 3MB RSS against nvi's 6MB in typical use, and it
feels snappy in daily use.
The limits are by design rather than oversight. Fixed
temp-file blocks and a line-pointer table capped at
LBLKS=900 in the default build give you about 230k lines,
or roughly 30MB of text. Beyond that, you get the classic
"Tmp file too large" — and that's fine, because a screen
editor isn't the right tool for huge files anyway.
Trade-offs worth knowing: no set ruler, single-level
undo, and a hard ceiling on file size. nvi is more
practical for daily work, especially if you live in YAML
where column awareness matters. But heirloom is closer to
the original, and the codebase is genuinely beautiful.
Worth a look.
#vi #unix #suckless #nvi
Published at
2026-05-05 17:19:30 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's\nessentially the cleaned-up 1985 ex/vi 3.7 code, brought\nforward by Gunnar Ritter and Carsten Kunze: small, simple,\nand very readable — about 25k LOC for the editor itself,\nversus 38k for nvi. The memory footprint is lower too,\naround 3MB RSS against nvi's 6MB in typical use, and it\nfeels snappy in daily use.\n\nThe limits are by design rather than oversight. Fixed\ntemp-file blocks and a line-pointer table capped at\nLBLKS=900 in the default build give you about 230k lines,\nor roughly 30MB of text. Beyond that, you get the classic\n\"Tmp file too large\" — and that's fine, because a screen\neditor isn't the right tool for huge files anyway.\n\nTrade-offs worth knowing: no set ruler, single-level\nundo, and a hard ceiling on file size. nvi is more\npractical for daily work, especially if you live in YAML\nwhere column awareness matters. But heirloom is closer to\nthe original, and the codebase is genuinely beautiful.\nWorth a look.\n\n#vi #unix #suckless #nvi",
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