[bachback]

well of course. Vi was specifically written by Bill Joy to optimize for every character, see

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_g...

And there is no reason we could ever improve on that 35 years later. we need those optimizations...

"It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. "

[perlgeek]

Whenever I use vim through a lagging SSH connection, I'm very happy that it's still usable (at least more so than other editors).

[mst]

If you can stand the fact that it's only got the original feature set, ex-vi.sf.net provides a version of the original vi that runs on modern unices.

I use it on a daily basis and have found that it copes with conference wireless far better than vim does.

[jamestomasino]

I feel the same way whenever I have to do work remotely on my phone. It's so precise and focused that I can get away with a few keypresses.

I think neovim could be a great project and a major change for vim, but it could just as easily never reach a viable state. I won't suggest they give up, but I'm also not putting a lot of hope into it. Bram's vim is amazing, and even vi is stellar. I don't really see a downside whether they succeed or fail.