Re: :open mode mumblings by an old guy (was "RFE: honor 'eol' setting regardless of 'binary' flag")

On 2014-07-14 16:10, Christian Brabandt wrote:
>>> | The vi (visual) utility is a screen-oriented *text* editor.
>>> Only the | open and visual modes of the editor are described in
>>> POSIX.1-2008;
>>
>> Just as an aside, this is about the worst quote you could pull, as
>> Vim *doesn't* support open mode. ;-)
>>
>> :help :open
>>
>> """
>> Vim does not support open mode, since it's not really useful. For
>> those situations where ":open" would start open mode Vim will
>> leave Ex mode, which allows executing the same commands, but
>> updates the whole screen instead of only one line.
>> """
>
> What exactly does open mode? I tried it in nvi, but whatever I
> tried, I just got an error message.

At the time, I only found one vi clone available that supported :open
mode (I don't remember whether it was Stevie or Elvis) which I wanted
to run locally on an Epson EHT-20/EHT-30 DOS-based handheld

https://www.google.com/images?q=epson+eht-30

at ${DAYJOB-2} in the early 2000s.

When you type :open (or I think there was a command-line flag to
start in open mode) it acts like visual-mode except it doesn't use
much of any screen-positioning commands (limited I believe to
typing/insertion/tab, backspace, and newline). It makes a bit of
gibberish out of your screen but the currently-displayed line should
match the edited line. It was initially designed so that vi could be
used on a hard-copy terminal (imagine using vi/vim to edit files with
your printer as your only display). Old vi would occasionally
default to this mode if $TERM wasn't set to something it could
recognize.

http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~bhoward/vi/vi30.html#38

-tim




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