[GSoC] About the idea: Unicode support in vi

[Zhihao Yuan]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Zhihao Yuan <lichray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Among *all* the GNU/Linux distributions I used, they include a vim
>> compiled in tiny mode (ln -s it to vi), which doubles the size of nvi,
>> in their base systems. A vim.tiny contains much more features compared
>> with nvi, but it's not compatible with POSIX vi.
>>
> Let's compare the comparable, I don't really care if PCbsd ship vim as
> its default, but FreeBSD as the base is not only aimed at desktop
> specifically. So you should take into account that I may want to run
> FreeBSD on an adm5120 board with 32MB of RAM, without having a text
> editor consuming too much disk-space/ram.
>
>  - Arnaud
>

If you really want to use vi in a 32MB mem environment, the ex-vi may
make sense. It consumes 1600KB memory while nvi consumes 2000KB. Note
that the ee editor uses same amount memory as ex-vi.

So basically, if no one disagree that we can drop the infinite undo,
multiple buffer, multiple window and some other potential missing
features, we can replace the nvi in the base system with ex-vi.

-- 
Zhihao Yuan
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.