Although I used `vi` on SCO Xenix in 1988, I thought it had died with proprietary xNix and that only a few lunatics still used it in the 21st century -- like a few diehards still run Classic MacOS or Amigas these days.
How wrong I was.
It is very hard to understand people's deep affection for what to me is a crufty old piece of relatively early computing history, and possibly #2 or #3 in my personal list of Ugliest Editors I've Ever Seen.
But then, TBH, xNix as a crufty old piece of early computing history, and if we lived in a sane world, it would be mostly forgotten by now, an early intermediary step on the way to some modern polished descendant of Inferno, treating datacentres as single machines, everything CPU-independent, which nobody ran on their desktop but powered lots of servers. C should be as dead as Plankalkül.
Me, I'd be running a modern Acorn-made machine with BeOS, and next to it an ARM Mac running a re-engineered hybrid of LisaOS and Copland with apps written in Dylan. Maybe some strange IBM OOPS OS that grew out of Taligent for business stuff.
But we don't live in a sane world. People assimilate software as culture, identifying with it, with the result that they keep re-implementing obsolete 1960s designs, ignoring their better successors, clinging to ugly hacks because they're ugly.
