vi - Visual Editor
The vi was developed as part of the BSD UNIX project. It has since been adopted as a standard System V feature. It was the first popular full-screen editor and is still very widely used.

vi always maintains an image on your screen of a portion of the file that you are editing. It requires a terminal that enables it to control the position of the cursor and place text at an arbitrary position on the screen. When editing a file, vi acts on a working copy of the file. All modifications apply to the copy; the original file remains unchanged until you request it.

For more information refer to the ZAM documentation (in German):

last change 01.12.2005 | | Print