xvi (pronounced ecks-vee-eye) is a portable multi-window version of the UNIX editor ‘vi’, derived from “STEVIE” in the 1980s. It has some useful enhancements, although not all of vi’s features have been implemented, and some things work differently from vi.
The program was originally developed for the Atari ST, but has been ported to AIX, BSD, HP-UX, MS-DOS, OS/2, QNX, Solaris, SunOS, Sunview, System V, Windows NT and Xenix/386 as well. In spite of its name, there is, as yet, no X-Windows-specific version of it.
It uses text windows separated by horizontal status lines on character mode displays and the windows may represent different files being edited, or different views on to the same file.
xvi is the full-feature vi clone with the smallest program size (under 100 Kbytes, compiling with clang -Os) and memory use.
This is free and open source software.
Website: martinwguy.github.io/xvi
Support:
Developer: Chris and John Downey
License: BSD-like license
xvi is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Vim-like Text Editors | |
|---|---|
| Neovim | Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability |
| Helix | Kakoune / Neovim inspired editor. |
| Lapce | Modern editor in Rust which uses native GUI and GPU rendering |
| NvChad | Neovim config aiming to provide a base configuration |
| LunarVim | IDE layer for Neovim |
| Kakoune | Implements Vi’s "keystrokes as a text editing language" model |
| Vis | Combining modal editing with structural regular expressions |
| vile | Text editor that combines aspects of the Emacs and vi editors |
| pyvim | Implementation of Vim in Python |
| gVim | Vim with a built-in GUI |
| amp | Vim-like editor written in Rust |
| Vy | Vim-like in Python made from scratch |
| moe | Command-line editor inspired by Vim |
| ad | Adaptable text editor |
| Levee | Also known as Captain Video |
| xvi | Portable multi-file text editor |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

