Russ A said [1] that nvi "is orphaned both upstream and in Debian". I wanted to emphasize that fact by pointing out that Gentoo's removing nvi for similar reasons, and trying to install it just now resulted in this "package.mask" message:
$ sudo emerge -p nvi # Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> (2020-02-17) # Based on very old code needing a lot of patches. Minimal upstream # activity since early 2011, last patches accepted in 2016. Multiple # unresolved bugs. app-editors/vim[minimal] is the recommended # replacement. # Removal in 30 days. Bug #690102. Arch uses "the traditional vi" [2], AFAICT, it was last released in 2005 and Arch has three patches for it. Arch's AUR has nvi from [3] version 1.79 and nvi-multibyte-upstream from [4] version 1.81. The three BSDs use nvi as "/usr/bin/vi". The READMEs indicate that FreeBSD has version 2.1.3, NetBSD has version 1.80, and OpenBSD has version 1.79. Version 1.81 has multibyte support and Debian and Gentoo use it. FreeBSD's version 2.1.3 is the result of a GSoC to add multibyte-encoding support [5]. That's when it jumped from 1.79 to 2.1.1. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/03/msg00243.html [2] http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ [3] https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/ [4] https://repo.or.cz/nvi.git [5] https://github.com/lichray/nvi2 PS: Fedora's vim-minimal is vim configured using "--with-features=small". PPS: Gentoo's vim[minimal] is vim configured using "--with-features=tiny" like Debian's vim-tiny.
