[HN Gopher] The POSIX specification of vi
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The POSIX specification of vi
        
       Author : exvi
       Score  : 52 points
       Date   : 2025-07-21 08:01 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pubs.opengroup.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pubs.opengroup.org)
        
       | wahern wrote:
       | For exploring the POSIX standard the frames version is very
       | useful: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/
        
       | nickandbro wrote:
       | Love vi, made a Vimgolf like app called:
       | 
       | https://vimgolf.ai
       | 
       | because I like vi so much. Although the app uses neovim
       | underneath the hood because it had an easier API to work with.
        
         | BipolarCapybara wrote:
         | Great site! I've been wanting to learn it for the past couple
         | of weeks, but didn't have enough motivation to sit trhough
         | tutorials. +1
        
           | Onawa wrote:
           | I learned vi(m) using https://vim-adventures.com/. It's $25
           | US for a 6-month license, which is a bit short. But I felt I
           | got my money's worth out of it and continue to use and love
           | vi(m) to this day.
        
             | nickandbro wrote:
             | Big fan of vim adventures too! It definitely gamifies the
             | learning of vim. Mine is more for the vim enthusiast who
             | want to measure up against other vim power users.
        
           | nickandbro wrote:
           | Thank you! It's an unfinished project of mine. Still looking
           | at adding more levels and allowing users to upload their own.
        
           | jmholla wrote:
           | Once you're the slightest but comfortable navigating vi, I
           | highly recommend Practical Vim. [0] It tooke me a few days to
           | get through, but I'm 100% in vim these days and more
           | effective in it than in my old primary editor PyCharm.
           | 
           | [0]: https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-
           | edit...
        
         | cocoa19 wrote:
         | Can I suggest dropping the sign up requirement and email
         | verification to try it out?
        
           | nickandbro wrote:
           | I agree! I am just working the containerization of the vim
           | instances. Right now using k8, but wasting $$$ on infra.
           | Moving to cloudflare containers to save that $$$ and make it
           | more available. In the mean time, temporary email sites are
           | allowed and not black listed.
        
         | rdancer wrote:
         | Marvellous!
         | 
         | :w<CR> should count the same as ZZ for the purposes of hiding
         | better solutions, else it's fairly easy to walk up the
         | leaderboard even though the better solutions are ostensibly
         | hidden.
        
           | nickandbro wrote:
           | Thanks, appreciate the feedback
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | Spawn vi or nvi (nvi2 under OpenBSD, it has unicode). Then, press
       | [esc] and run: :viusage [Return] [Esc] :exusage[Return] Now you
       | know the basics. Viusage: keyboard commands while in editing
       | mode. Exusage: typed commands for the command (:) mode.
        
       | Joker_vD wrote:
       | Ugh, all this crazy head-spinning cursor commotion... I'll just
       | keep using ed, thank you very much.
        
         | n3t wrote:
         | Yeah, it's just better to stick to the standard editor.
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | Huawei EulerOS is one of the few POSIX compliant Linux distros,
       | but it's a commercial one [0]
       | 
       | But it has a FOSS release, openEuler [1]
       | 
       | I actually want to download it now to check if the vi there is
       | really that POSIX version
       | 
       | 0, https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm
       | 
       | 1, https://www.openeuler.org/en/
        
       | chasil wrote:
       | You can see all the userland utilities by removing the "vi.HTML"
       | suffix from the URL.
       | 
       | https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | >mailx
         | 
         | mbox should die; or maybe set as a legacy option. Current
         | systems can handle thousands of email by using maildirs.
         | 
         | Also, one day bsdgames will enter into POSIX maybe but as a
         | test case, in order to be sure on how well the POSIX compatible
         | API behaves.
         | 
         | Phantasia(6) could be rewritten for balance and such...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-07-24 23:00 UTC)