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Stevie: Vim Predecessor ("ST editor for vi enthusiasts")

Stevie (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts) was a text editor created by Tim Thompson in 1987 for the Atari ST, serving as a precursor to the Vim editor. It was developed to provide vi-like editing capabilities on the Atari platform and later ported to other systems. Stevie's source code eventually contributed to the early development of Vim.

Background

Stevie (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts) was an early open-source text editor created by Tim Thompson in 1987 for the Atari ST computer. It was a clone of the Unix editor vi, which was notoriously hard to use but powerful. Stevie was later ported to Unix and became the direct foundation for Bram Moolenaar's Vim — the editor that eventually grew into one of the most popular text editors for programmers. Understanding Stevie matters because it fills the missing link between classic Unix vi and modern Vim, which today is installed on most Linux and macOS systems and has a massive ecosystem of plugins.

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