'vi' is driving me crazy

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2004, Kurt Wall wrote:
...
>At the time vi was written for UNIX, *ed* was "the standard,", which is why
>vi follows the ed standard. Again, at the time, vi was a terrific
>improvement over ed.
>
>Whose "standard" keystrokes do you want to follow? MS's? Perhaps IBM's?
>Maybe those from WordStar? Emacs'? This insistence on adhering to
>keystroke or command standards is quaint, but based on a false premise.

What standards are violated by some of these standards?  One of my
favorites is the WordStar ``diamond'' that used the ctrl-s key for
something.  This didn't work too well on serial terminals where ctrl-s is
XOFF, the serial standard to tell the server to stop transmitting until it
sees an XON.  Microsoft's using a single press of the ESC key is another
``standard'' that ignored the long-standing ANSI standard that the ESC
character didn't stand alone, but indicated the beginning of control
sequence.

The Radio Shack Scripsit word processor also used ctrl-s for something
which was fine when it was run under TRSDOS, but didn't work so well under
Xenix (particularly on the later Model 12/16 keyboards that put it on a
function key around the key pad next to the <ENTER> key.  I don't know how
many customer support calls I answered when people's machines ``locked''
when they were doing data entry in Visicalc or MultiPlan, and would
accidentally hit the function key that sent the XOF instead of <ENTER>.

Bill
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