Arch Linux

busybox configured to be only vi:

shared: 43KB (links to libc.so.6 only)
static: 653KB

Attaching the busybox .config file for this build. An alternative would be to use the mkinitcpio-busybox binary, but that has some useful features disabled (namely Unicode, iirc).

I'd like to hear what Tobias thinks here - anyway, nobody seems happy with ex-vi.

I don't agree with the "all features not stripped down" part if that was meant to get busybox on every system, but a vi-only build of busybox used as the system vi seems fine to me.

Okay, a vi-only build is fine too.

I don't think I'll have objections here, if that's what people are happy with. I saw one config, the 8bit one, how does the busybox vi play with encodings? Anyone has experiences?

And here seems to be the list of limitations:
* It does not support all common vi commands.
* It does not support the '!' command to execute a child process and capture its output
* It also lacks the normal vi crash recovery feature.
* It always assumes a vt102 type terminal (emulator)
* Only very few settings are configurable via :set
* .exrc configuration and configuration via environment variables are not supported
* Line marks are not correctly adjusted if lines are inserted or deleted before the mark.
* Only whole-line undo (uppercase 'U'), no last-change undo (lowercase 'u') is supported.
* Search is done case-insensitive.
* Command-counts need to prefix a command, and
* command counts for a, c, d, i, r, y and several other commands are not supported.
* Ex commands are not supported.

some stuff is serious though: command count (At least I use that a lot, and there are some build scripts or at least used to be that use ex-commands, they would then require vim?)

I see that busybox-vi might not be the best solution.

Tobias, another question: Why did we drop nvi in favor of ex-vi? I find ex-vi very hard to use, but I'm ususally not a vi user - I only use it when nothing else is available.

unicode support, or better the lack thereof. It was either not existent or after patching buggy at best; all together really annoying.

Here is my take on it:
The original purpose of all of that, and I think it still holds up, was to ship a reasonable small vi with the (very) core of Archlinux. This is a minimum, mainly to say we have it, to make it compliant. There are only a few viable solutions out of it:
- stick with the minimalistic ex-vi. Cumbersome but bearable. If you need more, install vim but I wouldn't wanna have the (huge!) vim runtime in core
- stick vi built from the vim sources into core. this vi is small and quite usable but the runtime that comes with it is huge (>30 MB after deflation, IIRC) (we had that before, the second downside is that every (g)vim is held up by the testing for the core vi package)
- built a custom minimized vi from vim sources with a custom stripped runtime. That means building a compliment runtime for the actual vim. That's a lot and cumbersome work - leave alone error prone. Did someone say, Debian?
- find a better minimalistic and maintained!! vi clone. Altogether, I think busybox is too limited over ex-vi, but might be less buggy. I can't say. I just install vim where I need it but I get by with ex-vi if I have too.

- ex-vi sometimes fails to exit and loops, which can be quite annoying. Only way to get rid of it is t use kill (from an other terminal).

- Our current vim + vim-runtime is just under 30MB, but I admit that's huge. Maybe we can let the vim package replace vi and create a symlink so if you can vim installed it gets used instead of ex-vi. Already happened to me that some program started vi (forgot to set $EDITOR; $EDITOR got removed by su -l; ..) and sometimes the bug I mentioned earlier appeared.

- building vi from the vim source is too much work imho

Currently I believe the best solution is to either not change anything or let vim replace vi. (conflicts=vi; provides=vi; symlink)

whats wrong with nvi?

@ Lavandero
Thomas Bächler (brain0) asked the same question https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20778#comment65858


How about vim-slim https://github.com/BlackIkeEagle/herecura/tree/master/herecura-stable/vim

./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var/lib/vim \
--mandir=/usr/share/man --with-compiledby=ArchLinux \
--with-features=tiny --disable-gpm --enable-acl --with-x=no \
--disable-gui --enable-multibyte --disable-cscope \
--disable-netbeans --disable-perlinterp --disable-pythoninterp \
--disable-rubyinterp --enable-luainterp=no

Download Size : 381,44 K
Installed Size : 1000,00 K

It doesn't need the vim-runtime.


Is it too big? How to make it play nice with vim (full edition)/gvim?