On Void, we have many clones of beloved vi(1) such as vim, neovim, nvi, vile, busybox vi, and of course the original ex-vi.

But today, I want to talk about neatvi, a reimplementation from scratch with minimal footprint (fewer than 6kLOC); it doesn’t even need ncurses! Nevertheless, it supports UTF-8, and even editing bidirectional text, and generally has a good coverage of the POSIX vi feature set.

Of course, it doesn’t provide all the bells and whistles of vim and friends, but it adds a few important features on top of plain vi, such as infinite undo/redo, basic syntax highlighting, and a partial implementation of ex(1).

It’s a nice editor for limited environments such as embedded devices or recovery systems, or for people that like unbloated software.