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by trn 1578 days ago
I have some comments here that address this, but, there are in fact many significant differences.

The OpenBSD version forked at Nvi 1.79 around 1996-1997 and has been developed in the OpenBSD base system for 25 years now, and has diverged greatly from Nvi. Nvi2 has also diverged significantly from both "upstream" Nvi and OpenBSD vi.

The OpenBSD release has significantly trimmed features and maintains a different structure than the others as the philosophy completely different. There is no Perl / Tcl / pluggable scripting engine support or alternate graphical user interfaces or similar.

There are significant differences in the lower level code for signal handling, options, etc.

While the core functionality of these editors are all largely the same, and they all share common heritage from Bostic's Nvi, there are trivial and non-trivial differences between all of these editors that are almost too numerous to summarize.

Reviewing the ChangeLog (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnsonjh/OpenVi/master/Ch...) since Nvi 1.79 to present should give you an idea of what's going on with this particular version.