A few notes on alternatives to vim that i have been investigating / using.

Reply to A few notes on alternatives to vim that i have been investigating / using. on Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:17:04 GMT

lemmus@social.vivaldi.net — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:17:04 GMT

@amcewen @drj If not going for an older Vim or EVi, my personal favourite ended up being vile ( https://invisible-island.net/vile/ ), compatible enough that experience carries over easily, but with a sufficiently different «feel» that I don't expect fully identical features and keybindings, as well as a nice feature set.

At the time of writing I'm using an older Vim, though, as when I checked my notes, I realised I really hadn't cared much about new features in Vim since something like 7.4.

My .02€.

Reply to A few notes on alternatives to vim that i have been investigating / using. on Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:42:45 GMT

amcewen@mastodon.me.uk — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:42:45 GMT

@drj thanks for that. Not quite sure what I'm going to do about it yet, but that's got some useful options for me to try.

It seems the nvi in Mint's package manager does cope with non-ASCII characters (as I've just installed it and opened a copy of your notes to see how it handled þ)

(I might well have been an emacs user, had whoever installed it campus-wide at Lancaster not set up some non-standard key bindings, so the chance for me to get indoctrinated then was lost )