"Vi is a "visual editor" - an editor which lets you view a
document, in its entirety, as you create and edit it. Those of
you from the Microsoft Word generation might find that a little
redundant - surely, you're thinking, all editors let you do that!
Well, not exactly - in the early days of UNIX, line editors like
edlin and ex were pretty standard, and creating a document in one of those babies involved using
arcane commands to add, remove and retrieve text from an invisible buffer...."