vi bug?
Daniel R. Levy
levy at ttrdc.UUCP
Mon Sep 8 11:26:47 AEST 1986
Thanks to the several people who wrote or posted to say that yes, this
(intercepting ex: or vi: [or ei: or vx: -- yuck] in the first or last few
lines of a file being read in) is an old, old "feature" allowing for auto-
configuration of vi, and that, yawn, it had been hashed over many many
times before on the net. (Guess I have to get a copy of the compleat net
archives, then, so I won't appear stupid to the oldtimers. Postpone those
backups, Joe, gotta mount a few dozen magtapes to grep for something :-). )
I sure would have preferred that this behavior wasn't the default, requiring
a command line option or environment variable to turn it on, or at the least
that it could be turned off by a command line option or something in the
$HOME/.exrc file. In certain contexts, e.g. editing ASCII database files,
it stinks. I particularly liked the message from the fellow who said that his
version of the vi source code deleted this "feature" by #ifdef SUICIDE
preprocessor directives. (I have now found it, in the routine checkmodeline()
in ex_io.c. Not the #ifdef SUICIDE directive, but rather the suicidal code.)
Dan
--
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| dan levy | yvel nad | my own and are not at all those of my em-
| an engihacker @ | ployer or the administrator of any computer
| at&t computer systems division | upon which I may hack.
| skokie, illinois |
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