[pydave]

Vim's addition of .vimrc and .vim allowing you to store editor programs to further accelerate your editing makes stand vim far beyond vi.

Credit Bill Joy for the modal editing paradigm, but vim is so much more than that. Most editors have a vi mode, but they don't compare to vim because they are awkward to script and don't have powerful regular expressions so readily available (both introduced in vim).

We could thank Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for enabling vi, but I thank Bram for keeping vi viable, portable, and well-supported across languages.

[zabzonk]

not sure thompson or ritchie ever used vi, or really enabled it. it is quite similar to the text editors on vax.