OpenBSD Handbook

OpenBSD 7.9 release · amd64 · Generated 2026-09-09

traditional-vi-20050325p2

traditional vi and ex

Back to search · Project homepage

Description

The vi editor is one of the most common text editors on Unix. It was developed starting around 1976 by Bill Joy at UCB, who was tired of the ed editor. But since he used ed as a code base, access to the original sources has required a commercial Unix Source Code License for more than twenty years. In January 2002, Caldera was so kind to remove usage restrictions to the Ancient Unix Code by a BSD-style license and thus vi is now finally free. This port of vi has generally preserved the original style, terminal control, and feature set. It adds support for international character sets, including multibyte encodings such as UTF-8, and some minor enhancements that were not present in BSD vi 3.7, but had been included in later vi versions for System V or in POSIX.2.

Package information

Ports path
editors/traditional-vi
Package architecture
amd64
Maintainer
Pascal Stumpf <pascal@stumpf.co>
Categories
editors
Available flavors
None listed

These are ports metadata. Binary availability depends on the release, architecture and mirror. Build and test dependencies are not an installation checklist.

Direct dependencies

Build

Installing and updating packages · Package details as JSON